Critical Introduction

Abstract

Go to any major poetry archive and you can hear Robert Browning on an Edison wax cylinder reciting ''How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix." This scratchy recording, made seven months before the poet's death, is one of the oldest by a major poet. It preserves a unique occasion, a dinner party on April 7, 1889 given by the artist Rudolf Lehmann. Colonel Gouraud, Edison's agent in Britain, brought along the newly invented phonograph, into which he invites a reluctant Browning to speak. After reciting a few lines of his poem he forgets the words then following upon a round of "hip, hip, hooray" from the assembled guests he returns, "shout[ing] his signature, 'Robert Browning' into the machine."