[Robert Browning by G. K. Chesterton]@TWC D-Link book
Robert Browning

CHAPTER VI
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He was always weaving and modelling and inventing new forms.

Among all his two hundred to three hundred poems it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that there are half as many different metres as there are different poems.
The great English poets who are supposed to have cared more for form than Browning did, cared less at least in this sense--that they were content to use old forms so long as they were certain that they had new ideas.

Browning, on the other hand, no sooner had a new idea than he tried to make a new form to express it.

Wordsworth and Shelley were really original poets; their attitude of thought and feeling marked without doubt certain great changes in literature and philosophy.
Nevertheless, the "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" is a perfectly normal and traditional ode, and "Prometheus Unbound" is a perfectly genuine and traditional Greek lyrical drama.

But if we study Browning honestly, nothing will strike us more than that he really created a large number of quite novel and quite admirable artistic forms.


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