Robert Browning: Selected Poems (Unabridged‪)‬

Burying the Bishop, Disinterring the Shorter Poems: WAGLAND SHINES!

Born (as was Charles Dickens) in 1812; died (as did Gerard Manley Hopkins) in 1889, Robert Browning (part Romantic, part Victorian, and certainly part Modern) remains one of the most influential yet controversial literary giants of the 19th Century. Controversial? Henry James called him "a poet without a lyre." Oscar Wilde acknowledged that Browning had a lyre but that its strings were broken, famously remarking, "He used poetry as a medium for writing in prose." Yet both men admired him as a consummate creator of character, even rivaling Shakespeare. These evaluations notwithstanding, those of us who vaguely remember Browning from high school as the quintessential composer of blank-verse dramatic monologues, will perhaps be surprised and delighted at the range of rhythmic -- and rhyming -- patterns the poems found here contain.

iTunes alone offers an embarrassment of riches when it comes to Browning audiobooks and podcasts. You can compare veteran voice actors David Timson and Patience Tomlinson’s superb collaboration “The Great Poets: Robert Browning,” with Frederick Davidson’s 5-hour marathon. Browning is a poet who rewards close listening, and no one will hold your attention better than the new kid on the Browning block; English actor Greg Wagman’s “Robert Browning: Selected Poems” is fascinating in part because Wagman elected to include only one canonical blank-verse poem; the rest are shorter, but have held the interest of Browning’s fans for over two centuries. I was especially moved by “The Lost Leader.” This poem seems more poignant than Shelley’s much earlier sonnet on the same theme, “To Wordsworth."

Obviously narrators differ in vocal tone and timbre, as well as interpretive approach. For these reasons alone you and I may prefer different readers. On a theoretical continuum from straight-up reading to the over-wrought ACTING so preciously satirized by Jon Lovitz's "Saturday Night Live" sketches, Greg Wagland lands in the golden middle: not quite understated; pensive but not subdued. That said, unlike say Davidson (who always sounds like Davidson), Wagland's tone varies as it should depending upon the poem, and his interpretations are always moving and dead on.

The poems on this audiobook, listed in ORDER, are: 1. The Bishop Orders his Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church 2. The Lost Leader 3. Love Among the Ruins. 4. Up at a Villa, Down in the City 5. A Woman's Last Word 6. A Toccata of Galuppi's 7. Love in a Life. 8. Life in a Love. 10. Two in the Campagna 11. Dubiety 12. Apparent Failure 13. Prospice 14. Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister 15. A Grammarian's Funeral 16. Pictor Ignatius 17. My Star.

All poems but the first one rhyme. So much for high-school memories and Oscar Wilde.