The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume I
With Variant Readings and Annotations

“The Ohio edition offers a virtual rare bookroom full of texts for any Browning poems where the determined critic can trace the author’s changing intentions and craft.”

Victorian Poetry

“The editorial policy of the Ohio edition has always been completeness, with the recording of all variants, changes, and corrections made by the poet himself, and these volumes continue that aim with admirable care and painstaking attention to detail.”

Journal of Browning Studies

“The Ohio [Browning] is everything a reader could wish.”

English

In seventeen volumes, copublished with Baylor University, this acclaimed series features annotated texts of all of Robert Browning’s known writing. The series encompasses autobiography as well as influences bearing on Browning’s life and career and aspects of Victorian thought and culture.

Volume I contains two dramatic poems, Pauline; A Fragment of a Confession and Paracelsus, along with a sonnet, “Eyes Calm Beside Thee.” Pauline was written in 1832 and published in March 1833, London: Saunders and Otley, Conduit Street.

Browning’s principal source material for Paracelsus was Frederick Bitiskius’s edition of the works of Paracelsus, the early Renaissance alchemist, mystic, and physician; as well as the article on Paracelsus in the Biographie Universelle. E. D. H. Johnson wrote that in Paracelsus, “Browning first attacks the problem of communication, while still insisting on the primacy of the intuitions over the rational intellect. Paracelsus is a study of intellectual pride and its humbling.”

As always in this acclaimed series, a complete record of textual variants is provided, as well as extensive explanatory notes.

Roma A. King, Jr. was Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at Ohio University.   More info →

John Berkey is Professor Emeritus at Rutgers University.   More info →