Robert Browning's poetry showed a special resistance to the text-oriented, aestheticizing tendencies of the New Criticism. It was easy, almost too easy, to find ways to talk about the speaker and his tone of voice; but difficulties arose the moment one tried to move from these statements, as one would in a poem by Keats or Frost, to statements about the poem. Something about the nature of the dramatic monologue itself seems to have been especially unreceptive to organic, unifying conceptions of art. It is not surprising that Roma King's broadly New Critical, The Bow and the Lyre, should have received acclaim at the time for (among other qualities) reading the unifying images in Browning's poems. But the work from that period that has had staying power, Robert Langbaum's The Poetry of Experience, is one that hardly fit the critical temper of the time. In retrospect, we may say that its power derived especially from its refusal to let New Critical dogmas circumscribe the kinds of critical approaches applied to the odd form of the dramatic monologue. Langbaum's concept of experience was (is) attractive; his historical stories of the relation between Romanticism, nineteenth-century preference in drama for character over action, and the dramatic monologue were extremely interesting ones. But what was and remains most influential was a strategy for approaching the dramatic monologue, the famous one in which the poem commands a balance of judgment and sympathy. Langbaum's readings of the Duke and the rest have been much debated and often battered. The terms he laid down for the debate have proved hearty and persistent.