Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism | Browning, Robert - Daniel Karlin (essay date 1993)

Daniel Karlin (essay date 1993)

SOURCE: "Hatred's Double Face," in Browning's Hatred, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1993, pp. 169-92.

[In the following essay, Karlin examines the binary oppositions in Browning's poetry, particularly the opposition between love and hate. Karlin asserts that the interplay between such contraries exists within all aspects of Browning's poetry and is especially fundamental to the poet's exploration of human relationships.]

Following Anaximander he [Heraclitus] conceived the universe as a ceaseless conflict of opposites regulated by an unchanging law, but he found in this law the proper object of understanding; it is the Logos which spans but could not exist without the cosmic process: 'people do not understand how what is at variance accords … with itself, an agreement in tension as with bow and lyre' … This Logos Heraclitus equated with transcendent wisdom and the elemental fire.

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