ABSTRACT
The titles of individual poems often reflect this emphasis on character and dramatic speech: poems are named after their speakers ('Fra Lippo Lippi', 'Andrea del Sarto', 'Cleon', 'Mr Sludge, "the Medium" " 'Martin Relph'), sometimes with a specific pointer to the dramatic situation ('Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister', 'Artemis
1863, and as 'Dramatic Lyrics' and 'Dramatic Romances' in the Poetical Works of 1868 and 1888-9. See Woolford and Karlin: ii, Appendix A (pp. 463-9). Some of the poems included in either category don't fit ('How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix' and 'The Confessional' are 'lyrics', while 'Time's Revenges' is a 'romance'), and the boundary between the two categories is in any case blurred by such poems as 'By the Fire-Side', 'Saul', 'Waring', 'The Last Ride Together', and 'A Grammarian's Funeral' (the first two are 'lyrics', the others are 'romances'). Browning defined the 'idyl' of Dramatic Idyls as 'a succinct little story complete in itself (letter of 7 Oct. 1889, cited in Pettigrew and Collins: ii 1067).
