Exorcising Shelley out of Browning: "Sordello" and the Problem of Poetic Identity

"Sordello" tells us much about the central conflict of Robert Browning's early career, the crisis of poetic identity that arose from his complex and ambivalent relation to the Romantic tradition. This study demonstrates how Browning transmuted the historical Sordello into a dramatic persona hopelessly polarized by a tension between what, in his 1851 "Essay" on Shelley, the poet identified as the subjective and objective poetic impulses. It suggests that in this polarization the character bears a striking resemblance to Browning during his formative years, when he was writing poems in the confessional, subjective manner of his mentor Shelley. Browning never quite gave up hope of reconciling the two impulses in his work. Yet close attention to his development of Sordello's soul indicates that the poem may be read validly as an elaborate justification, to himself and to Shelley, for Browning's rejection in his poetry after "Sordello" of the specifically Promethean aspects of Romantic subjectivity. These, and especially the central Shelleyan notion of the absolute authority of the poet's self, Browning found to be increasingly incompatible both with his own evolving ideas of poetry and the poet's proper relation to society, and with the newly emerging philosophical and moral premises of his age.