A hugely prolific poet, Robert Browning blended rhythmic and figurative skill with psychological subtlety in order to develop a revisionary mode of dialogical writing. Best known for his dramatic monologues, he immersed himself in the Victorian expansion of print culture, exploring the dominion of words as a medium for understanding and perception, and realizing the uncertainties that underpin both tactical argumentation and lyrical expressiveness. He explored an array of contemporary issues: historiography, aesthetics, mental health, emotional violence, love, evolution, spiritualism, religious authority, Higher Criticism, institutional discourse. Fascinated by those who live on moral margins, by stranglers, frauds, and skeptical bishops, by egotism and self‐persuasion, as well as by the inflections of intimacy and desire, he reconfigured poetry as an art that depicts immediate social action, the mediations and ironies of human speech acts.