Senior Poetry: My Last Ducess

'Robert Browning was born in Camberwell, southeast London, to Robert Browning, Sr., and Sarah Anna Wiedemann Browning. His father worked as a clerk for the Bank of England. Although he came from a wealthy family, the senior Browning was cut off by his father because of a grand act of defiance: Sent to Jamaica to manage a family estate, he freed all the slaves and distributed the land to them as farms. The younger Browning was influenced by his father's love of learning, his interest in painting, and his habit of reading odd histories and sensational crime stories...'

'Although the early part of Robert Browning’s creative life was spent in comparative obscurity, he has come to be regarded as one of the most important English poets of the Victorian period..'

'The theme is the underlying message that the writer or artist wants to convey. Themes can feature in poetry, a short story, a novel, or even a work of art...'

'Robert Browning (1812-89) is, along with Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the most famous and widely studied poet of the Victorian era. Yet for the first two decades that he was writing, he was virtually ignored by the public. In this post we offer a very short biography of Browning, a brief introduction to his life and work, touching upon the most curious and interesting aspects...'

'From Michelangelo’s arthritis to Abraham Lincoln’s depression, learn the stories behind seven historical figures who may have suffered from undiagnosed physical ailments...'

Serial killers, villains and deranged individuals have always exerted a deep fascination which was reflected in the emergence of Gothic and Macabre traditions in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. The satisfaction from studying twisted mind derives not only from discovering the pleasure-pain relation during reading about the gruesome incidents but also from perceiving killings only in terms of the intellectual game or a riddle to be solved. Yet, violence and murders were not only the subject matter of cheap sensational writing; as a matter of fact, one of the instances of murder-whydunit poetry can be found in the writings of a British canonical writer Robert Browning.

"There are some poems which the critic has to handle very carefully with a particular kind of sensitivity and an attention which instinctively feels the almost miraculous tension between word and line, movement and stillness, syntax and rhythm; and at first sight "My Last Duchess" may not seem to be one of these ... "

" ... We don't go to Browning for confession, for what Sylvia Plath (who is, poetically, Browning's polar opposite) called "the big strip tease": he is, quite simply, the most unsubjective poet who ever wrote. Forget the Full Monty; Browning doesn't take off so much as his cravat ... "

"Poem of 56 lines in rhyming couplets by Robert Browning, published in 1842 in Dramatic Lyrics, a volume in his Bells and Pomegranates series. It is one of Browning’s most successful dramatic monologues."