Bloomsbury Poetry Classics are selections from the work of some of our greatest poets. The series is aimed at the general reader rather than the specialist and carries no critical or explanatory apparatus. This can be found elsewhere. In the series the poems introduce themselves, on an uncluttered page and in a format that is both attractive and convenient. The selections have been made by the distinguished poet, critic and biographer Ian Hamilton. Robert Browning was born in 1812. He won fame as a poet in his mid-twenties but, with the publication in 1840 of the deeply obscure Sordello, was thought to have wasted his early promise. For the next 20 years his work was received with amused suspicion. In 1845 he began his famous courtship of Elizabeth Barrett. They married in 1846 and therafter lived mainly in Italy until Elizabeth's death in 1861. During the 1860s, Browning's popularity revived with Men and Women and The Ring and the Book, and by the time he died in 1889 his reputation as the most original of the great Victorian poets was thoroughly secure.