Robert Browning's Compounds

Abstract

This article is part of a cluster that draws material from the recent conference Metre Matters: New Approaches to Prosody, 1780–1914. It comprises an introduction by Jason David Hall and six articles presented at the conference, whose aim was to address renewed scholarly interest in versification and form across the long nineteenth century, as well as some of the methodologies underpinning it. The papers included in the cluster look both to the minutiae of Romantic and Victorian metres and to their cultural intertexts. The conference, hosted by the University of Exeter's Centre for Victorian Studies, was held 3–5 July 2008.

The cluster is made up of the following articles: Jason David Hall, ‘Metre, History, Context: Introduction to the Metre Matters Cluster’.

Emma Mason and Rhian Williams, ‘Reciprocal Scansion in Wordsworth's “There Was a Boy” ’.

Ross Wilson, ‘Robert Browning's Compounds’.

Margaret A. Loose, ‘The Internationalism of Ernest Jones's Dialectical Prosody’.

Nancy Jiwon Cho, ‘Gender and Authority in British Women Hymn-Writers’ Use of Metre, 1760–1900’.

Ashley Miller, ‘Involuntary Metrics and the Physiology of Memory’.

Summer Star, ‘ “For the Ins?ape's Sake”: Sounding the Self in the Metres of Gerard Manley Hopkiṅs’.

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This article is a study of the use of compound words in Robert Browning's poetry. It explores the use of compounds in Sordello, The Ring and the Book and The Agamemnon of Aeschylus in particular. Although it addresses the semantic aspects of compound words, it especially focuses on their metrical aspects and thus makes a contribution to our current understanding of Browning's versification. I claim that the metrical features of compound words are central to the formation of meaning in Browning's verse. In order to conduct this investigation, I draw on work by a number of literary critics, metrists and linguists, including Derek Attridge, Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle.