Analysis Of The Dramatic Monologues Of Tennyson And Browning

The Dramatic Monologues of Tennyson & Browning:
Two of the most prominent and prolific poets of the Victorian Age are Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning. They both had unique styles and applied new and untested techniques in their prose. Browning concentrates on the thoughts of his desperate characters and attempts to explore the deepest recesses of their twisted personas. He seeks to comprehend human nature, religion, and society as a whole. To gain an understanding of the universe and our place within it, he delves into the deepest make-up of his creations. Tennyson, meanwhile, tries to draws understanding from exterior certainties, concepts, and matters and then attempts to express it through lavish linguistics. One of the biggest significant …show more content…
Browning resented his contemporary’s precedence, and supporters of Tennyson, meanwhile, begrudged Browning’s posturing. In Andrea del Sarto (Browning, Andrea del Sarto), the painter del Sarto, a clearly pathetic man, gives his wife all the money he makes painting for her to cuckold him over and over again. We can feel his torture as we see a man who is clearly flawless artist, but inferior as a man. He strives for less perfection in his painting which he feels he could achieve if only he could acquire the love of his wife, which is all he really wants. “And thus we half-men struggle” (Browning, Andrea del Sarto), explains clearly that he feels incomplete without her love. At the end we are left with no empathy towards del Sarto who has no one to blame but himself. Even though it is not stated openly, we can feel the narrator spitting this epitaph over and over again. In 'Ulysses ' (Tennyson, Ulysses), Tennyson deals with a dissimilar character type and disposition. Ulysses is a fidgety sailor who constantly voices his dissatisfaction with his present state. He names himself an ‘idle king, ' and does not have faith that there is any use for him at home. These feelings set the temperament for the entirety of the poem, forewarning of the exploratory essence of Ulysses, and his frustration at having to endure at home. He begins illumination his crew by saying 'I cannot rest from travel ' (Tennyson, …show more content…
The first named would always stand at the head of the literature of the Victorian period. It was difficult to overrate the enormous influence for good that his splendid intellect and true and clear conscience exercised over this country. There was no poet in the whole course of our history whose works were more likely to live as a complete whole than he, and there was not a line which his friends would wish to see blotted out. Robert Browning was a poet of strange inequality and of extraordinary and fantastic methods in his composition. However much one could enjoy some of his works, one could only hope that two-thirds of them would be as promptly as possible forgotten—not, however, from any moral objection to what he wrote. He was the Carlyle of poetry. ”