Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning - W. C. Roscoe (review date 1857)
W. C. Roscoe (review date 1857)
SOURCE: "Aurora Leigh," in The National Review, Vol. 4, No. VIII, April, 1857, pp. 239-67.
[In the following excerpt, Roscoe claims that Aurora Leigh shows great poetic promise, but faults its excessive length, finding the work filled with unnecessary detail and its characters vague and indistinct.]
If we rightly understand her, [Elizabeth Parrett Browning] tells us that Aurora Leigh is her attempt in a poem "unscrupulously epic" to "represent the age" in which she lives. She admits that to most men their own age, being too close, is as ill-discerned, as would be the lineaments of that colossal statue into which Xerxes proposed to carve Mount Athos to the peasants "gathering brushwood in his ear." But, she says,
Poets should
Exert a double vision; should have eyes
To see near things as comprehensively
As if after they took their point of sight,
And...
[The entire page is 7307 words long]
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