Browning’s Critique of Organic Form in The Ring and the Book. Victorian Poetry 52.3 (Fall 2014): 445-464. doi: 10.1353/vp.2014.0018. Download from Project Muse or Academia.edu.
Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book seems an unlikely candidate for an exploration of organic form. However, in this article in the scholarly journal Victorian Poetry, I argue that Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book, long and ungainly as it is, critiques Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s concept of organic form in ways that literary critics should attend to. The Ring and the Book critiques Coleridge’s organicism on political and social grounds and suggests that active reading offers an alternative form of literary vitality. Browning reveals the ways in which organic metaphors can erase agency, spelling out the problematic moral and political consequences of organic form.
Like Browning’s short poems, The Ring and the Book flies in the face of the Romantic ideal of a whole, closed poetic form—and in it, Browning criticizes the organic metaphors that undergird that ideal. First, I explore how Browning challenges and revises Coleridge’s concept of fancy in his complex—and perplexing—opening metaphor of the book as a ring. The second section of this article shows how Browning unpacks the moral and political consequences of naturalizing human will through the poem’s organic metaphors for Pompilia. Finally, I suggest that Browning does offer an alternative to Coleridge’s organic form: Browning casts active reading as the source of literary vitality and, through the story of finding the Old Yellow Book in the marketplace in Book One, he models active reading and challenges his own readers to engage in it.
Image from The Country of The Ring and the Book, by Frederick Treves (London: Cassell, 1913). By Internet Archive Book Images, no restrictions, Wikimedia commons.
Michelle Niemann 