Balaustion’s Adventure: Including a Transcript From Euripides.

BROWNING, Robert.

$2,250.00

Item Number: 147688

London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1871.

First edition of this poetic retelling of Euripides’ ‘Alkestis’ by Victorian poet Robert Browning. Octodecimo, original cloth with gilt titles to the spine and decorative borders stamped in black to the front and rear panels. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the title page, “Mrs. Procter — with RB’s affectionate regards.” The recipient was presumably the wife of Browning’s long-time friend and correspondent, Bryan Waller Procter, one of the numerous lawyer-poets of nineteenth-century England. From the library of noted collector William Strutz with his small bookplate to the front pastedown. In very good condition. Rare and desirable signed and inscribed.

Robert Browning was an English poet and playwright whose dramatic monologues put him high among the Victorian poets. He was noted for irony, characterization, dark humor, social commentary, historical settings and challenging vocabulary and syntax. His career began well – the long poems Pauline (1833) and Paracelsus (1835) were acclaimed – but his reputation fell back for a time – his 1840 poem Sordello was seen as wilfully obscure – and took over a decade to recover, by which time he had moved from Shelleyan forms to a more personal style. In 1846 Browning married fellow poet Elizabeth Barrett and moved to Italy. By her death in 1861 he had published the collection Men and Women (1855). His Dramatis Personae (1864) and book-length epic poem The Ring and the Book made him a leading poet.