Audrey's Blog: Elizabeth Barrett Browning Biography

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Elizabeth Barrett Browning Biography

My impressions of Elizabeth Barrett Browning: After reading the biography on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, I had the sense that she was a woman greatly affected by the tragedies and wonders in her life. For example her mother's death, her father's fearful characteristics and her marriage to her adoring husband. Her deep emotions, portrayed through her poetry, came from the core of her being. It seems as though she focuses on important issues, in particular the female role in society. Lastly, I am most impressed with how "intune" Elizabeth seemed to be with herself and how she was feeling at every precise moment in her life.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born on March 6, 1806 in Durham, England and died June 29, 1861 in Florence Italy. Elizabeth is best known for her love poems, particularly Sonnets from the Portuguese and Aurora Leigh. Some poets nowadays consider Elizabeth to have a feminist persuasion in her poetry.

Elizabeth was the oldest of her siblings and had an extraordinarily joyful childhood. However, at the tender age of 15 she became dangerously ill due to a previous injury in her spine. Due to her sickness, Elizabeth’s heath was damaged permanently.

Her family moved to London in 1838 and lived at 50 Wimpole Street. In London she was published in periodicals and came out with her first collection called The Seraphim and Other Poems in 1838.

Later, Elizabeth’s mother, Edward Barrett Moulton, drowned herself to death causing Elizabeth to be intimidated to interact with anyone outside of her small group of friends. Although Elizabeth was hesitant to talk to the outside world, her name was well recognized throughout the literary community.

In January 1845 Elizabeth received a note from the poet Robert Browning: “I love your versus with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett. I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart—and I love you too”. The two married on September 12, 1846. Elizabeth’s father, however, knew nothing of the courtship or wedding. Elizabeth stayed and lived at home for a week after the marriage was final due to fear of her father. She published Sonnets from the Portuguese in 1850, poems on her reluctance to marry. They settled in Florence where Elizabeth gave birth to her only child, Robert Wiedemann Barrett, in 1849.

Elizabeth continued to write about spiritualism and the occult, sympathy for the Florentines, pride in Napoleon III, and antislavery. In 1861 Elizabeth grew ill and died.

Some helpful links:
http://www.biography.com/people/elizabeth-barrett-browning-9228932
http://poetry.org/browning.htm
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/ebb/index.html
http://www.cswnet.com/~erin/ebbpoem.htm

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Literary Devices in Poetry

*alliteration: The repetition of consonant sounds, especially at the beginning of words. Example: "Fetched fresh, as I suppose, off some sweet wood." Hopkins, "In the Valley of the Elwy."
*assonance: The repetition of similar vowel sounds in a sentence or a line of poetry or prose, as in "I rose and told him of my woe." Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" contains assonantal "I's" in the following lines: "How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, / Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself."
*climax: The turning point of the action in the plot of a play or story. The climax represents the point of greatest tension in the work. The climax of John Updike's "A&P," for example, occurs when Sammy quits his job as a cashier.
*connotation: The associations called up by a word that goes beyond its dictionary meaning. Poets, especially, tend to use words rich in connotation. Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" includes intensely connotative language, as in these lines: "Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright / Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, / Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
*figurative language: A form of language use in which writers and speakers convey something other than the literal meaning of their words. Examples include hyperbole or exaggeration, litotes or understatement, simile and metaphor, which employ comparison, and synecdoche and metonymy, in which a part of a thing stands for the whole.
*hyperbole: A figure of speech involving exaggeration. John Donne uses hyperbole in his poem: "Song: Go and Catch a Falling Star."
*iambic pentameter:
*lyric: A type of poem characterized by brevity, compression, and the expression of feeling.
*metaphor: A comparison between essentially unlike things without an explicitly comparative word such as like or as. An example is "My love is a red, red rose,"
*personification: The endowment of inanimate objects or abstract concepts with animate or living qualities. An example: "The yellow leaves flaunted their color gaily in the breeze." Wordsworth's "I wandered lonely as a cloud" includes personification.
*petrarchan sonnet: divides into two parts: an eight-line octave and a six-line sestet, rhyming abba abba cde cde or abba abba cd cd cd.
*simile: A figure of speech involving a comparison between unlike things using like, as, or as though. An example: "My love is like a red, red rose."
*sonnet: A fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter. The Shakespearean or English sonnet is arranged as three quatrains and a final couplet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg. The Petrarchan or Italian sonnet divides into two parts: an eight-line octave and a six-line sestet, rhyming abba abba cde cde or abba abba cd cd cd.
*symbol: An object or action in a literary work that means more than itself, that stands for something beyond itself. The glass unicorn in The Glass Menagerie, the rocking horse in "The Rocking-Horse Winner," the road in Frost's "The Road Not Taken"--all are symbols in this sense.
*tone: The implied attitude of a writer toward the subject and characters of a work, as, for example, Flannery O'Connor's ironic tone in her "Good Country People." See Irony.