The new lyric is not only of a different metre, but of a different
shape. No one, not even Browning, ever wrote a poem in the same style as
that horrible one beginning "John, Master of the Temple of God," with
its weird choruses and creepy prose directions. No one, not even
Browning, ever wrote a poem in the same style as _Pisgah-sights_. No
one, not even Browning, ever wrote a poem in the same style as _Time's
Revenges_. No one, not even Browning, ever wrote a poem in the same
style as _Meeting at Night_ and _Parting at Morning_. No one, not even
Browning, ever wrote a poem in the same style as _The Flight of the
Duchess_, or in the same style as _The Grammarian's Funeral_, or in the
same style as _A Star_, or in the same style as that astounding lyric
which begins abruptly "Some people hang pictures up." These metres and
manners were not accidental; they really do suit the sort of spiritual
experiment Browning was making in each case. Browning, then, was not
chaotic; he was deliberately grotesque. But there certainly was, over
and above this grotesqueness, a perversity and irrationality about the
man which led him to play the fool in the middle of his own poems; to
leave off carving gargoyles and simply begin throwing stones.
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