I can't bear to think of any part of the whole mass of lies & intrigues, —I like no one man engaged in the matter, the King & the Emperor not a bit more than Garibaldi: well, it seems ordained that if you believe in heroes you will be sorry for it, sooner or later. I have of course heard other versions of the thing, different from yours,—don't know & hardly care what is the true, so bad is the best.

In the Introduction to my recent edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Casa Guidi Windows, I present Mrs. Browning as an astute and knowledgeable witness to the early events of the Italian Risorgimento in Florence during the years 1847–1851.* In that essay I concur with the Florentine critic Giuliana Artom Treves, who wrote that “‘Casa Guidi Windows’ is the poetic cry which rises from Tuscany to the world in praise of the desire for liberty,” and that the poem in which Mrs. Browning “describes the upheaval in Tuscany deserves the perennial gratitude of Italians for the way she frankly assumes the rôle of poet of the Italian Risorgimento.”

That Sordello does not require annotation can be maintained only by those to whom the words “tenzon, virlai or sirvent” are immediately familiar, or by those who regard their meaning as an irrelevance. When I began annotating the poem for the first volume of the Oxford English Texts edition of The Poetical Works, it seemed to me that my first task was to determine as precisely as possible the meaning of each individual word. In the present article I shall not be concerned with Browning's use of his sources, or with “the historical decoration” (greatly as that may seem to us to exceed what “a background requires”), but with words which may cause difficulty because they are rare or because Browning uses them in an unusual sense, and (by a natural transition) with unusual words which serve to suggest something of the literary context of the poem.

Samuel Clemens' infatuation with the poetry of Robert Browning during and after the 1880s demonstrates the subtle dimensions in Browning's verse that a gifted oral interpreter can disclose. Whatever first attracted Clemens to the Browning canon, however, it was not the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. When Clemens began courting Olivia Langdon she was already a partisan of Mrs. Browning's works, and the couple had several good-natured exchanges about the intelligibility of her poems. In a letter of 17 May 1869 Clemens jocularly alluded to “some dark & bloody mystery out of the Widow Browning”; on another occasion he turned to Livy for an explanation of obscurities in Aurora Leigh.* In the second week of Livy Clemens' marriage she appended a teasing note to the letter which Clemens was writing to Mrs. Mary Mason Fairbanks, vowing that she, along with Clemens' sister and niece, “will make Mr Clemens read aloud to us in Mrs Browning—Felicity to us—but what to him?”* Around 1872 Clemens declared, in a letter written to Livy, “If they were to set me to review Mrs. Browning, it would be like asking you to deliver judgment upon the merits of a box of cigars.”

One of the constant factors in Robert Browning's life was his love of music, a love which he repaid by devoting two of the finest examples of his poetic art to musical subjects. “Abt Vogler” and “A Toccata of Galuppi's” are among the most frequently studied and anthologized poems, the latter being a particular favorite with general reader and critic alike. Yet had Browning never written these two poems, his attachment to music would have been just as apparent through the numerous references to music, concerts, and musical personalities in his other poems and his letters. In fact, Browning's knowledge of music and his status as an amateur musician are commonplaces of the Browning legend, a part of the received Gospel. But while we know a great deal about Browning's youthful training in music, his technical knowledge of musical forms, and his philosophy of music, we know very little about the important matter of where his taste in music lay. If one reads Browning's poems and letters with the express purpose of discovering his musical likes and dislikes, the results are surprising and—in terms of his “musical” poems—rather revealing, for they indicate that Browning, living in the great age of musical Romanticism, was something of a musical reactionary who looked with disdain on the great composers of his era and on their musical styles, preferring instead the forms and performing techniques of the preceding century.

Browning's melancholy epistle from the polymorphous artist Cleon to the Greek tyrant Protus is a poem about immortality, not only in a religious realm but in an artistic dimension as well. In fact, the emblems in the poem illustrate, at least on one level, that Browning subordinated the religious aspect of the theme to concerns about his art. Thus, one can read many of the religious references as having as much relevance to Browning's wish to attract an audience to his own message as to the efforts of “Paulus” to convert the Gentiles.

Twenty years ago interest in Browning's poetry, in England at any rate, was at a low ebb: both Eliot and Leavis had pronounced against him. The first stirrings came with Robert Langbaum's The Poetry of Experience (1957), which raised problems about the moral and epistemological aspects of the dramatic monologues. There followed in the sixties a series of books and articles reaffirming the centrality of The Ring and the Book* for the Browning canon. As a result of this “revaluation” some of the earlier long narratives, in particular Paracelsus and Sordello* received critical reappraisal. The Oxford University Press saw fit to issue a revised edition of Browning's poems from 1833 to 1864 edited by Ian Jack (1970), and Penguin filled a useful gap with its publication in 1971 of The Ring and the Book.

In the Introduction to The Brownings' Correspondence: A Checklist we noted that “a checklist is not, and cannot be, complete, definitive and static; letters change hands, new letters come to light constantly, and previously unpublished correspondence appears regularly in new books and magazines.” To maintain the usefulness to scholars of our work, we undertook to make periodic revisions through the medium of Browning Institute Studies. This is the first such amendment.