"Uproar in the echo" : Robert Browning's poetry of vitalism

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the concept of the individual will in the poetry of Robert Browning. The study maintains that Browning occupies a position in the line of vitalist thought that begins with Schopenhauer and finds its clearest expression in the writings of Nietzsche, Shaw, Bergson, and D. H. Lawrence.

Chapter 1 establishes and clarifies Browning's relationship to Schopenhauer and his philosophy of the Universal Will, briefly surveys the intellectual context from which the concept of the will emerged to become a crucial nineteenth-century notion, reviews Browning's reading which might bear on the formation of his philosophy of the will, and examines the importance that Browning's Romantic predecessors attached to the will.

Chapter 2 addresses the problems of subjectivism and unbridled idealism in Pauline, Paracelsus, and Sordello. Here, Browning explores man's failure to transcend the confines of his "gross flesh" and issues the warning that humankind stands to trivialize its experience if the will is not brought to bear on unrealistic aspirations. The principal themes in these poems are the disavowal of the Romantic desire to unite with some "prevailing power" and the role of "intuitive willing" in providing escape from a demeaning social context.

Chapter 3 examines an important and fascinating subtheme in that poetry written between 1840 and 1864--the will-to-possession and power—argues that Pippa Passes is an enumeration of the will's functions, and points to Browning's interest in the psychology of willing and to his developing vitalist theory.

Chapter 4 maintains that The Ring and the Book is an anatomy of the intuitive faculty, that it is the most ambitious political poem of the age, and that it is the culmination of Browning's experiments with the psychology of the will in that he has created a community of characters trying to follow their wills while struggling against implacable laws of nature and systems of restraint and authority.

Finally, Chapter 5 concentrates only on those poems of Browning's last period (1869-1889) which underscore his political skepticism and which make clear that the individual will, with intuitive impulse, is the sole means of cultural transcendence in a world of ever-changing reality.