Robert Browning in Portugal: The response of poets, critics and readers in the lusophone world

Abstract

Robert Browning has attracted the attention of a small though arguably influential group of readers. The poets and writers of the Modernist movement, most notably Fernando Pessoa, became not only more interested than their nineteenth-century predecessors in Anglophone literature as such, but also in the new technique of a depersonalised poetic voice, found variously in Pound and Eliot, and pioneered by Browning. Were it not for this very restricted group of Portuguese and Brazilian intellectuals, amongst poets, critics and translators, the panorama surrounding Browning’s scholarship and readership in the Lusophone world might seem as barren or deserted as the devastated expanses Childe Roland traverses in his quest for the Dark Tower.