Linking England to Italy : the Brownings' poetry of the Risorgimento

Abstract

Italy seemed to Elizabeth Barrett Browning a nation of minor poets. She wrote of the Florentines during the 1848 revolution: They are an amiable, refined, graceful people, with much of the artistic temperament as distinguished from that of men of genius - effeminate, no, rather feminine in a better sense - of a fancy easily turned into an impulse, but with no strenuous and determinate strength in them. Her response to the Risorgimento was shaped by her feeling for her own verse; and both, I will suggest, were governed by the idea of a marriage between Italy and England. In the above quotation the strenuous and determinate strength which must be grafted on to Italy's feminine temperament in order to make of it a genius - one capable of writing that great poem in action which would be the unification of Italy - is implicitly both masculine and Anglo-Saxon. At the end of The Ring and the Book, Robert Browning paid tribute to his wife's work, 'linking our England to... Italy;' that linkage occurred not only in Barrett Browning's partisan engagement with the Italian cause, or in the union between the half-Italian Aurora and the wholly English Romney in Aurora Leigh, but also in the structure and versification of some of her poetry. Her husband's agreements and differences with her on the subject of Italian politics also make themselves felt in the detailed texture of his writing.