Browning, Robert - Harold Bloom (essay date 1985)
Harold Bloom (essay date 1985)
SOURCE: Introduction to Modern Critical Views: Robert Browning, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1985, pp. 1-21.
[In the following essay, Bloom explores the tendency of Browning's critics to misread the nature of the epiphanies and the "visions-of-failure" in Browning's poetry, noting that epiphanies are often wrongfully interpreted as negative events, while "visions-of-failure" are mistakenly read as celebrations.]
One of the principles of interpretation that will arise out of the future study of the intricacies of poetic revisionism, and of the kinds of misreading that canon-formation engenders, is the realization that later poets and their critical followers tend to misread strong precursors by a fairly consistent mistaking of literal for figurative, and of figurative for literal. Browning misread the High Romantics, and particularly his prime precursor, Shelley, in this pattern, and...
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