Robert Browning (1812-1889)

Educated mostly at home, Browning was an extremely bright child and a voracious reader who learned Latin, Greek, French and Italian by the time he was fourteen. He attended the University of London in 1828, the first year it opened, but left to pursue his own reading - his verse is full of references and allusions to other texts. 

In the 1830s he met the actor William Macready and tried several times to write verse drama for the stage. At about the same time he began to discover that his real talents lay in taking a single character and allowing him to discover himself to us by revealing more of himself in his speeches than he suspects - the characteristics of the dramatic monologue. 

He married fellow poet Elizabeth  Barrett in 1846 and a few days later they eloped to Italy (to escape her domineering father), where they lived until her death in 1861. The years in Florence were among the happiest for both of them, although Elizabeth was a much more successful poet during her lifetime. The Ring and the Book (1868-9), based on an "old yellow book" which told of a Roman murder and trial, finally won Browning considerable popularity. He and Tennyson were now mentioned together as the foremost poets of the age.