The other charge is not true. Browning cared very much for form;
he cared very much for style. You may not happen to like his style; but
he did. To say that he had not enough mastery over form to express
himself perfectly like Tennyson or Swinburne is like criticising the
griffin of a mediaeval gargoyle without even knowing that it is a
griffin; treating it as an infantile and unsuccessful attempt at a
classical angel. A poet indifferent to form ought to mean a poet who did
not care what form he used as long as he expressed his thoughts. He
might be a rather entertaining sort of poet; telling a smoking-room
story in blank verse or writing a hunting-song in the Spenserian stanza;
giving a realistic analysis of infanticide in a series of triolets; or
proving the truth of Immortality in a long string of limericks. Browning
certainly had no such indifference. Almost every poem of Browning,
especially the shortest and most successful ones, was moulded or graven
in some special style, generally grotesque, but invariably deliberate.
In most cases whenever he wrote a new song he wrote a new kind of song.
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