Men and Women   By: Robert Browning (1812-1889)

Introduction and Notes: Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke, from the edition of Browning's poems published by Thomas Y. Crowell and Company, New York, in 1898.

Editing conventions: The digraphs have been silently rendered as "ae" or "oe."

indicates u grave, a grave, e grave, and a circumflex. Similarly, u umlaut is rendered as "ue."

Stanza and section numbers have been moved to the left margin, and periods that follow them have been removed.

Periods have been omitted after Roman numerals in the titles of popes and nobles.

In keeping with contemporary practice, commas have been deleted when they precede dashes and spaces deleted in such contractions as "there's" where the printed text has "there 's."

In references to Bible verses, Roman numerals have been changed to Arabic numerals (e. g., "John iii.16" is changed to "John 3:16").

MEN AND WOMEN

BY

ROBERT BROWNING

CONTENTS Introduction (by Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke) "Transcendentalism: A Poem in Twelve Books" How It Strikes a Contemporary Artemis Prologizes An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician Johannes Agricola in Meditation Pictor Ignotus Fra Lippo Lippi Andrea del Sarto The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church Bishop Blougram's Apology Cleon Rudel to the Lady of Tripoli One Word More

INTRODUCTION

Thirteen years after the publication, in 1855, of the Poems, in two volumes, entitled "Men and Women," Browning reviewed his work and made an interesting reclassification of it. He separated the simpler pieces of a lyric or epic cast such rhymed presentations of an emotional moment, for example, as "Mesmerism" and "A Woman's Last Word," or the picturesque rhymed verse telling a story of an experience, such as "Childe Roland" and "The Statue and the Bust" from their more complex companions, which were almost altogether in blank verse, and, in general, markedly personified a typical man in his environment, a Cleon or Fra Lippo, a Rudel or a Blougram. These boldly sculptured figures he set apart from the others as the fit components of the more closely related group which ever since has constituted the division now known as "Men and Women."

Possibly the poet took some pleasure in thus bringing to confusion those critics who, beginning first to take any notice of his work after the issue of these volumes of 1855, discovered therein poems they praised chiefly by means of contrasting them with foregoing work they found unnoticeable and later work they declared inscrutable. Their bland discrimination, at any rate, in favor of "Men and Women" became henceforth inapplicable, since the poet not only cast out from the division they elected to honor the little lyrical pieces that caught their eye, but also brought to the front, from his earlier neglected work of the same kind as the monologues retained, his Johannes Agricola of 1836, Pictor Ignotus of 1845, and Rudel of 1842. Later criticism, moreover, that even yet assumes to ring the old changes of discrimination against everything but "Men and Women," is made not merely inapplicable by this re arrangement, but uninformed, a meaningless echo of a borrowed opinion which has had the very ground from under it shifted.

The self criticism of which this re arrangement gives a hint is more valuable.