“It is unsatisfactory to read to one's self”: Mark twain's informal readings

Samuel Clemens' infatuation with the poetry of Robert Browning during and after the 1880s demonstrates the subtle dimensions in Browning's verse that a gifted oral interpreter can disclose. Whatever first attracted Clemens to the Browning canon, however, it was not the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. When Clemens began courting Olivia Langdon she was already a partisan of Mrs. Browning's works, and the couple had several good-natured exchanges about the intelligibility of her poems. In a letter of 17 May 1869 Clemens jocularly alluded to “some dark & bloody mystery out of the Widow Browning”; on another occasion he turned to Livy for an explanation of obscurities in Aurora Leigh.* In the second week of Livy Clemens' marriage she appended a teasing note to the letter which Clemens was writing to Mrs. Mary Mason Fairbanks, vowing that she, along with Clemens' sister and niece, “will make Mr Clemens read aloud to us in Mrs Browning—Felicity to us—but what to him?”* Around 1872 Clemens declared, in a letter written to Livy, “If they were to set me to review Mrs. Browning, it would be like asking you to deliver judgment upon the merits of a box of cigars.”

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Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning: An Annotated Bibliography for 1976

Peterson¹

1978

Browning Inst. Stud.

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“It is unsatisfactory to read to one's self”: Mark twain's informal readings

Cited by 4 publications

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“I don't know A from B”: Mark Twain and Orality

“I don't know A from B”: Mark Twain and Orality

“A Splendor of Stars & Suns”: Twain as a Reader of Browning's Poems

Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning: An Annotated Bibliography for 1976

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