Browning's Apology: Robert Browning, Wordsworth, and William Knight

Between 1880 and 1888 Robert Browning corresponded with William Knight, founder and president of the Wordsworth Society. This correspondence has not been studied. As a young man, Browning had attacked Wordsworth for being a political reactionary and, most unfairly, as a poet whose egotism blinded him to the realities of human suffering; after he achieved fame, though, he joined the Wordsworth Society and referred to the older poet in flattering terms, knight seems to have found this puzzling, and his correspondence was an attempt to prise a more detailed response to Wordsworth out of Browning. After some years of delay, Browning supplied Knight with a list of favourite Wordsworth poems, which has until now been ignored by critics. The list is composed of little‐known pieces; it is the contention of this article that it is in fact Browning's coded ‘confession’ of the tangled and often traumatic nature of his struggle with his Romantic predecessor, and of his change of attitude towards him. By choosing certain poems, Browning could point the astute reader (among whose ranks he evidently did not include Knight) to previously published poems, both his own and Wordsworth's, that expressed or related to this covert struggle.