Robert Browning

Robert Browning (1812–1889) was an English poet, born in Camberwell, the son of a bank clerk whose library of six thousand books educated him. His early poems and plays were little read, but the dramatic monologues of Men and Women and Dramatis Personae, in which speakers from the Renaissance and elsewhere reveal themselves without meaning to, made him Tennyson's rival. In 1846 he eloped with the poet Elizabeth Barrett to Italy, where they lived until her death in 1861. The Ring and the Book, a murder story told from twelve points of view, appeared in 1868 and 1869. He is buried in Westminster Abbey.