A Poem in Twelve Volumes
Thirteen years after the publication of Men and Women, Browning revisited the first edition, and made a reclassification of it. He separated the simpler rhymed presentations of an emotional moment, such as Mesmerism and A Woman's Last Word, or the picturesque rhymed verse telling a story of an experience, such as Childe Roland and The Statue and the Bust, from their more complex companions, such as Cleon, Fra Lippo, and Rudel. The resulting collection of only twelve poems is typically found today in many abridged editions of Men and Women, and in the somewhat more accurately titled volume, Transcendentalism: A Poem In Twelve Volumes.
Read more about this topic: Men And Women (poetry Collection), Transcendentalism
Famous quotes containing the words poem, twelve and/or volumes:
“Stir of time, the sequence
returning upon itself, branching
a new way. To suffer, pains, hope.
The attention
lives in it as a poem lives or a song
going under the skin of memory.”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)
“Yet I well remember
The favors of these men. Were they not mine?
Did they not sometimes cry “All hail!” to me?
So Judas did to Christ; but He, in twelve,
Found truth in all but one; I, in twelve thousand, none.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The ladies understood each other, in the careful way that ladies do once they understand each other. They were rather a pair than a couple, supporting each other from day to day, rather a set of utile, if ill-matched, bookends between which stood the opinion and idea in the metaphorical volumes that both connected them and kept them apart.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)