Browning's Music Poems: Fancy and Fact
Browning is one of Shelley's main heirs in the nineteenth century. As a boy he had worshipped Shelley, who is the most obvious single influence in both Pauline (pub. 1833) and Paracelsus (pub. 1835), his earliest published works. He grew uneasy about the relationship later, but he never stopped being in important ways a poet in the tradition of Shelley. One of the enduring likenesses between them is the way both use their strong sense of the weakness of language in developing the meaning of poems. Shelley uses it most fully in Epipsyckidion, where it serves a vision of the inadequacy of all human satisfactions. His solution is to set up a number of more or less satisfactory terms, calling attention to the fact that no one of them will do, and that they all together “do” only in special ways. This corresponds in language to the tendency to resist restrictions on personal relationships that appears in the Shelleyan “harem.” The solution in both cases can be awkward, but in the case of language, at any rate, the awkwardness is part of the meaning.