Michael Meredith

Stefan Hawlin

Volume 15 in The Complete Poetical Works of Robert Browning presents poetry Browning wrote in his seventies, his last two volumes: Parleyings (1887) and Asolando (1889). The former is the poet's last sustained meditation on life and on his times, a nine-section credo covering religion, history, poetry, politics, art, and music. Asolando is a coda to his whole oeuvre, a mixture of short love lyrics, historical monologues and anecdotes, light verse, and poems which are quite sui generis, all grouped around the theme of 'fancies and fact'. Both volumes are presented here with previously unknown sources, a wealth of new contextual material, and many textual nuances clarified, giving a fresh view of the last phase of Browning's career. What emerges is a poet more seriously Christian, Protestant, and Liberal than previously supposed, more interested in Britain's destiny and Empire, more enmeshed in the local battles of the 1880s?and a writer of considerable range and wit.

Stefan Hawlin

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