Robert Browning
1812–1889
Biography
Robert Browning (1812–1889) was an English poet and playwright, born in London, and one of the foremost poets of the Victorian era. His characteristic form is the dramatic monologue, in which a single speaker gives away far more about himself than he intends. Through these speakers he revived figures from the past and present alike, from a Renaissance painter to a jealous duke. Poems such as 'My Last Duchess', 'Porphyria's Lover' and 'How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix' are still widely anthologised. His early long poems were admired by some readers and dismissed as obscure by others, and it took him more than a decade to find the voice that made his name.
In 1846 he married the poet Elizabeth Barrett and moved with her to Italy. After her death in 1861 he returned to London. The collection Men and Women (1855) contains many of his finest monologues. The Ring and the Book (1868–1869), a long poem that retells a single murder case from seventeenth-century Rome through the voices of several speakers, made him a leading poet of his day. By the time he died in 1889 he was regarded by many Victorians as a sage and philosopher-poet, and societies for the study of his work were founded in Britain and the United States.
The Pied Piper of Hamelin, the tale of a piper who rids a town of rats and then leads its children away when he is not paid, first appeared in 1842 in Dramatic Lyrics, one of the pamphlets he issued as Bells and Pomegranates. It draws on an old German legend, and it remains one of his most popular poems, read to children as well as to adults. The Pied Piper of Hamelin, and Other Poems on this site brings that tale together with other pieces by him, a convenient way to meet the irony and sharp characterisation for which he is known.
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Books
The Pied Piper of Hamelin, and Other Poems
by Robert Browning
Browning's story of the piper who rid Hamelin of rats and then, unpaid, led away its children comes here with his other tales in verse for the young, Hervé Riel, the Cavalier Tunes, Incident of the French Camp and Clive. It is the schoolboys' selection of 1910 from the Every…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.