Tag Archives: Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The New York Browning Society Presents – TOGETHER THROUGH TIME The Brownings in Word & Song

TOGETHER THROUGH TIME

The Brownings in Word & Song – Composed by Elizabeth Fowler Sullivan 

Featuring: KT SullivanTammy Grimes,  Stephen Downey,
Matthew CowlesTovah FeldshuhSteve RossBrian Murray,
Craig RubanoKeith Merrill, and Nicole Mitchell 

“From Brown Girls to Elizabeth Barrett Browning” – Tusiata Avia – Wednesday, January 15 2020

PDF: Browning Society January Newsletter 2020

The New York Browning Society, Inc. Newsletter
Founded in 1907
The National Arts Club
15 Gramercy Park South
New York NY 10003

Date Wednesday, January 15
Time 1:00– 2:00PM
“From Brown Girls to Elizabeth
Barrett Browning” by Tusiata Avia

by Laura Clarke

Tusiata Avia, “I go to My Sister-Artists and We Talk,” 2017

From a young age, I became an expert at trying to fit. Imagine me as one of those full-figured Victorian ladies trying to stuff herself into a whalebone corset. I’ve spent a good deal of my life lacing myself into impossible shapes, pulling myself in so tight that my eyes nearly popped out of my head. So tight, I could only take the shallowest of breaths.

It wasn’t until my mid-30s, when I entered a life in the arts, that I discovered what a gift my life had given me. Many gifts in life start off as painful ones. Not fitting was great training. Not fitting was a gift. It was a spiritual gift.

It allowed me to walk between worlds, to become a boundary walker, a shape shifter. It enabled me to inhabit a number of different worlds and write from inside those worlds in a voice that
rang true.

Poet and playwright Tusiata Avia is in New York City for her groundbreaking show
Wild Dogs Under My Skirt, the first Samoan female ensemble to perform at the Soho. She is
an acclaimed poet, performer and children’s book writer. Avia’s poetry collections are Wild
Dogs
Under My Skirt, which she staged as a one-woman show around the world from 2002
2008, Bloodclot, and Fale Aitu—Spirit House. She has held the Fulbright Pacific Writer’s
Fellowship at the University of Hawai’i (2005), was the Ursula Bethell Writer in Residence at
Canterbury University in 2010, and the 2013 recipient of the Janet Frame Literary Trust
Award. We are delighted that Avia will be our speaker on January 15th.

In her essay “I go to My Sister-Artists and We Talk,” Avia speaks about the importance of having a supportive network of sister-artists, from past to present. She writes that “it is easy to believe that we are not sisters and allies and midwives to each other’s beautiful things, but that we are fighting each other tooth and nail to survive, that the failure of your beautiful thing’s funding or award or good review means the greater possibility that my beautiful thing might have a chance at life.” Avia asserts that “we have all given birth to someone or something. This is our nature. It is also our nature to help midwife for each other. It is only fear that stops us.” She explains that in  finding a spiritual connection with sister-artists, “we confess to each other and realise how much the same we are. We ignite courage in each other. We act as mother-confessors and absolve each other.”

Please join us in listening to Avia converse with Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who also conceived of herself as a sister-artist. In her presentation, From Brown Girls to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Avia will focus on Barrett Browning as a warrior poet.

Our Meeting and Wild Dogs Under My Skirt:

Tusiata Avia – “From Brown Girls to Elizabeth Barrett Browning” – National Arts Club 1/15/2020 NYC

 

“Words of Love” – Bob McNeil, Poet -Wednesday, April 10 2019

PDF: Browning Society April Newsletter 2019

The New York Browning Society, Inc. Newsletter
Founded in 1907
The National Arts Club
15 Gramercy Park South
New York NY 10003

Meeting Wednesday, April 10 2019
Time 1:00– 2:00PM
Bob McNeil, “Words of Love”

by Laura Clarke

In anticipation of Bob McNeil’s talk “Words of Love,” I want in this month’s newsletter to take a closer look at Browning’s first letter to Elizabeth Barrett. It is the letter that began one of the most renowned literary love stories of all time, and it also provides an interesting insight into the Romantic poetic persona that Browning wanted to present to his future wife. The letter also
foregrounds some of the key themes that Browning explores in his poetry:

I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett,—and this is no off-hand complimentary letter that I shall write,—whatever else, no prompt matter-of-course recognition of your genius and there a graceful and natural end of the thing: since the day last week when I first read your poems, I quite laugh to remember how I have been turning and turning again in my mind what I should be able to tell you of their effect upon me—for in the first flush of delight I thought I would this once get out of my habit of purely passive enjoyment, when I do really enjoy, and thoroughly justify my admiration—perhaps even, as a loyal fellow-craftsman should, try and find fault and do you some little good to be proud of hereafter!— but nothing comes of it all—so into me has it gone, and part of me has it become, this great living poetry of yours, not a flower of which but took root and grew .. oh, how different that is from lying to be dried and pressed flat and prized highly and put in a book with a proper account at top and bottom, and shut up and put away .. and the book called a “Flora,” besides! After all, I need not give up the thought of doing that, too, in time; because even now, talking with whoever is worthy, I can give a reason for my faith in one and another excellence, the fresh strange music, the affluent language, the exquisite pathos and true new brave thought—but in this addressing myself to you, your own self, and for the first time, my feeling rises altogether. I do, as I say, love these Books with all my heart—and I love you too.

Robert Browning begins his first letter to Elizabeth Barrett by declaring a love so deep and sincere that it goes quite beyond the ordinary. Browning concedes that it is not a typical letter of praise because he cannot offer Elizabeth constructive feedback about her poetry as a fellow poet or as a critic, since he has perceived the totality of her poetry through feeling that ‘rises altogether.’ Since to break that feeling down into its constituent parts through analysis would be
to lose its organic or natural power, he can only do justice to her ‘great living poetry’ by
asserting the totality of his love, rather than by giving reasons for his appreciation.

Browning constructs a metaphor to convey the difference between knowing and feeling,
comparing a flower desiccated and trapped between the pages of a book to a flower
flourishing in nature, blooming from the growth of its plant and falling to the ground to contribute to the plant’s grown with its own decay. For Browning, to know something is to give ‘a proper account’ of it, and this knowledge is thus only as deep as its details; whereas to feel something is to be overcome with the inherent truth or genius of that thing, only expressible ‘with all my heart.’

This comparison between feeling and knowledge or analysis is indeed an enduring theme throughout Browning’s poetry. When the force of a person’s feelings triumphs over their analytical faculties, they can bypass an analysis of its parts and open themselves to a perception of the organic whole of a work of art in all its intended vitality.

Browning ends the letter by disclosing to her that he had once before had the chance to
meet her in person:

Mr Kenyon said to me one morning “would you like to see Miss Barrett?”—then he went
were too unwell—and now it is years ago—and I feel as at some untoward passage
in my travels—as if I had been close, so close, to some world’s-wonder in chapel or
crypt, .. only a screen to push and I might have entered—but there was some slight .. so
it now seems .. slight and just-sufficient bar to admission, and the half-opened door shut,
and I went home my thousands of miles, and the sight was never to be.

With this image of the crypt or chapel, Browning depicts Elizabeth as the object of
his reverence and worship, and hints at an almost spiritual calling to see her, just as in
the trope of the heroic quest. Although his journey was thwarted, he declares that
reading Elizabeth’s poetry allowed him to experience this mystical union with her. He
ends the letter with an affirmation of the force of her poetry and his commitment to
her and to her art:

Well, these Poems were to be—and this true thankful joy and pride with which I feel
myself
           Yours ever faithfully,
           Robert Browning.

We hope you can join us to learn more about Robert and Elizabeth’s famous love story.

Bob McNeil recites “Annabel Lee”

A Window View to Who We are by Bob McNeil

Bob McNeil Presents “Words of Love” for the New York Browning Society @ The National Arts Club 15 Gramercy Park South Wednesday, April 10, 2019

Performance of Dear Miss Barrett – Thursday, January 17, 2019

PDF: Browning Society January Newsletter 2019

The New York Browning Society, Inc. Newsletter
Founded in 1907
The National Arts Club
15 Gramercy Park South
New York NY 10003

Monthly Meeting * 1:00– 3:00PM
Thursday, January 17, 2019
Performance of Dear Miss Barrett

by Laura Clarke

The Browning Society of New York is excited to invite members and guests to a performance of selected songs from the musical Dear Miss Barrett. For this month’s newsletter, I asked composer and music professor Michael Kurek to discuss the genesis of Dear Miss Barrett and what inspired him to write a musical adaptation of the Brownings’ famous love story.

I must confess at the outset that I am a latecomer to the Brownings, beyond the few poems one reads in school. Finding them took a bit of a convoluted path. By profession, I am a classical composer and had never written for the theater. My classical works have been played by
symphony orchestras and chamber groups on five continents, won the top annual award in composition from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and been number one on the Billboard classical chart. In 2010 I married Crystal Kurek, who happened to be a Browning fan, as well as a very wonderful local theatrical performer (and who will play EBB at our reading in
January). In the last five years, she has performed in twenty musicals in theaters in the greater Nashville area, including the lead roles of Mary Poppins (in Mary Poppins) twice, Eliza Doolittle (My Fair Lady), Maria (West Side Story), Truly Scrumptious (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang), Fantine (Les
Miserables), and others.

Crystal was the one who suggested the Brownings to me as the subject of a potential musical, should I ever be persuaded to try writing one, hint, hint. It so happens that my classical music is known for being neoromantic and melodic, and on more than one occasion people had suggested to me that some of my instrumental melodies were crying out to be sung with words. One evening at our home, Crystal hosted a social gathering of several women, all leading Nashville theater performers, and I thought this might be a good test audience. As they were about to leave, I asked them if they might kindly step into my composing studio and take a listen to something, and they graciously agreed. I put on a symphonic recording of the slow movement of my Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, which had been performed several times
nationwide. I proceeded to sing along with the melody for them my slightly modified words to EBB’s “How Do I Love Thee?” which fit the tune hand in glove. My back was to these women, because I was facing the score on my computer screen, and when I turned around, I saw them all in an emotional state; they absolutely loved it. Then I knew I was on to something. “How
Do I Love You?” became the first song of my show to be written, and in all, six of the
twenty-four songs in the show borrowed melodies from my previous classical works.
The rest are new.

As a professor of music at Vanderbilt University, I had done a good amount of published academic prose writing about music over the years and critiqued the writing in many student term papers, so I decided to take a crack at writing the book for a Browning show myself. Then I would show it to lots of theatrical writers and directors for their advice and critique. This I
did, producing, thanks to their good comments, several revisions. I had obtained a first edition of all of Elizabeth’s and Robert’s letters to each other, from which I drew both dialog and lyrics, and I read and studied a few Browning biographies, including Dared and Done (1995) by Julia
Markus. It was a task to decide what scenes, in such a limited time span, would give an
audience a few “snapshots,” or at least a sense of the Brownings, while having to painfully omit so many things one would wish to have, were it a comprehensive biographical treatment – not the least of which was Flush, the dog! I will ask forgiveness in advance of the NYBS members if I have, of necessity, neglected something dear to them. But just think, if people can only discover the Brownings through my show, many will go on to learn much more about them and their works, later.

I chose to put the focus of my book on the love story rather than on Elizabeth’s conflict with Papa, as had been done in the play and movie versions of The Brownings of Wimpole Street. There are still two big songs for Papa, but we will not be doing those among our selections for the NYBS. For additional interest, I created an original, parallel story with a modern-day couple,
Sarah and Henry, with Sarah as a huge fan of EBB. I believe her character is important, both for comic relief and as an effective bridge and advocate for the Brownings to present-day young people. The show therefore jumps back and forth across time, including some numbers where characters sing simultaneously across time, unaware of each other, but with similar concerns. When they are alone in their own time, though, the modern characters generally sing in a more
popular musical theater style, while the historic characters sing in a more classical, yet tuneful style, highlighting the time contrast. This creates something of a hybrid genre between popular Broadway theater and light opera, which could be problematic in some ways but, I believe, ultimately of real interest to reviewers, in itself. From Sondheim to Les Miserables, finding some
such bridge or hybrid has been under discussion. Rather than to find a merger of styles in every song, though, I keep the Broadway and classical styles mostly distinct, in separate songs, but present them side by side in the same show, justified by the switches in time between present and past.

Needless to say, in the process of working on this, though a latecomer, I have caught my wife’s enthusiasm for the Brownings and strongly believe in a mission to perpetuate their works and legacy to new generations, which I hope this show will help to do, and I am deeply grateful to the New York Browning Society for their interest.

We do hope that you will be able to join us for this exciting event. Please note that the performance will be held on Thursday, the 17th of January, rather than our usual Wednesday meeting.

To Live in A Dream – Song from “Dear Miss Barrett” – National Arts Club NYC 01/17/2019
A Reading of Selected Scenes from Dear Miss Barrett by Michael Kurek

Rare Books and Tea NY – Song from “Dear Miss Barrett” – National Arts Club NYC 01/17/2019

Lets Work Something Out – Song from “Dear Miss Barrett” – National Arts Club NYC 01/17/2019

Annual Holiday Poetry Reading – Wednesday, December 12, 2018

PDF: Browning Society December Newsletter 2018

The New York Browning Society, Inc. Newsletter
Founded in 1907
The National Arts Club
15 Gramercy Park South
New York NY 10003

Monthly Meeting, 1:00 PM
Wednesday, December 12, 2018
Annual Holiday Poetry Reading

by Laura Clarke

Every year in December, the New York Browning Society welcomes its members and visitors to share with each other a favorite quote from the poetry of Robert Browning or Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In the spirit of this festive celebration, I would like to place a central tenet of Browning’s philosophy in the context of the Victorian idea of Christmas.

Interestingly, before the early nineteenth century, Christmas was not a widely celebrated holiday in England. The biggest Winter holiday was the Feast of the Epiphany, or Twelfth Night, on January 6th, and Easter was the most important holiday on the Liturgical Calendar. Christmas was not a popular holiday because the Puritans had disapproved of a celebration that was aligned with a Pagan Winter festival; furthermore, since the Catholic worship of saints’ days was banned during the Reformation, the link between St. Nicholas and Christmas implicated this holiday in contested theological debates. In Germany, however, the sacredness of Christmas was still emphasized by the very instigator of the Protestant Reformation himself, Martin Luther.

In his 1530 Christmas Sermon, Luther emphasized the importance of honoring Christmas as a celebration of God’s divine love, agape, which is embodied in the birth of Jesus. Thus in Protestant Germany, St. Nicholas was replaced with the Christ Child, das Christkindl, whose gifts reflected the gift of love from God that is Christ. This emphasis on divine love and incarnation,
rather than on Easter and atonement, ushered in a new symbolic focus on children.

Friedrich Schleiermacher’s popular A Dialogue on the Celebration of Christmas (Die Weinachtsfeier: Ein Gesprach), published in 1806, and E.T.A Hoffman’s Nutcracker and Mouse King (Nussknacker und Mausekönig), published in 1816, reinvigorated Protestantism in the early nineteenth century and defined the holiday afresh as an inward experience centered in
the family. It is Schleiermacher’s conviction that Christmas makes everyone a child again; that is, it elicits a feeling that heightens our perception of the religious idea that is embodied in Jesus. Each speaker in Schleiermacher’s dialogue reveals the significance of Christmas to lie in an inward spiritual idea rather than in a celebration that is anchored in the literal and external
historical narrative of the Nativity, or even in a Church service. Thus for Schleiermacher the idea of God that is embodied in Christ can be apprehended through the love of a mother for her child, through spiritual feelings, or through music.

The German Romantic idea of Christmas, as a spiritual experience embodied in family, was introduced to England through Prince Albert, who studied with August Wilhelm Schlegel at the University of Bonn. In 1848 the Illustrated News published a drawing of Prince Albert and Queen Victoria celebrating Christmas with their children around an adorned Christmas tree, which served to solidify Christmas as a new sacred national celebration: the German Christmas
tree became a key component of this new holiday; German Christmas carols were translated into English by Catherine Winkworth, including Luther’s own Christmas songs, and became once again a focal point of English celebrations; and of course, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol
would cement the new symbolic significance of Christmas in the Victorian imagination.

Christmas for the Victorians is a holiday of love, and Browning, we might say, is a poet of love. Browning’s idea of love is derived from Plato and from the Christian concept of love of which John speaks in his First Epistle—the concept that God is love and that to love is to know the divine. This for Schleiermacher was the essence of Christmas.

Browning was not a strictly orthodox religious thinker, believing along with Elizabeth Barrett Browning that the spiritual truths of religion are not known through theological doctrines but inwardly through feelings; likewise, they both believed that it was not possible to apprehend spiritual realities through the logic of the intellect but only through imagination and love. In
Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day, Browning’s speaker takes the reader on an imaginary journey on Christmas eve to a dissenting chapel in London, a Catholic church in Rome, and to a university lecture in Göttingen. The speaker criticizes aspects of all three religious positions, but, more
importantly, he apprehends the transcendent through the human expression of love—a
love and faith that is shared by all three celebrations on Christmas Eve.

We hope that you will be able to join us on December 12th for our holiday celebration.

“The Brownings in Tuscanyshire” – Tom d’Edigio, Poet – Wednesday, October 10, 2018

PDF: Browning Society October Newsletter 2018

The New York Browning Society, Inc. Newsletter
Founded in 1907
The National Arts Club
15 Gramercy Park South
New York NY 10003

Monthly Meeting:
Wednesday, October 10, 2018
The Brownings in Tuscanyshire
Tom d’Edigio – Poet

by Laura Clarke

When I met our president James Kepple over lunch to discuss my new position as
the Corresponding Secretary, he handed me an innocuous looking cardboard box.
To my great delight, I found inside a treasure trove of documents relating to the rich
past of the New York Browning Society. Among the documents there were programs that
detailed plans for ambitious study classes as well as the minutes from meetings dating
back to the 1920s. I spent a wonderful afternoon reading through this eclectic
collection of materials, but I was particularly struck by the published minutes
from the December meeting of 1942, held at the Waldorf Astoria, in which Grace Hazard
Conkling, a professor of poetry at Smith College, gave a talk on Browning entitled
“The Responsibility of the Poet.” This responsibility was certainly a concern for
Browning in the nineteenth century, just as it was for Professor Conkling at the time of
the Second World War.

For my first newsletter and as an opening to this season’s program of talks and events, it
seemed fitting to ponder: what interested people about Browning in the past?
What interests us about Browning now? What were the goals of the Browning
society when it began? How has it evolved, and what new directions will it take in the
future? When reading the minutes for Professor Conkling’s talk, I could not help
but linger on a paragraph in which she spoke of Browning’s enduring modernity. I
quote this section in full because it speaks to the importance of Browning today and to
the continuation of our society, especially at a time when the humanities are seen to be
have less relevance for our contemporary issues and needs:

When planning a course at Smith College, to serve as a sort of connection between the older poetry and modern verse, given a choice between Tennyson and Browning, Mrs. Conkling unhesitatingly chose Browning. For, she said, Browning scarcely seems to belong in the nineteenth century. He seems of the moment. He has the modern approach—the indirect, the colloquial. The flicker and flash of his irony; the way in which his interest in people takes in both the evil and the
good; the fact that he doesn’t moralize or preach but lets people speak for themselves—if they are condemned, it is out of their own mouths; the fearless way in which he tells the truth, no matter how
unpleasant—all this is modern. Mrs. Conkling expressed the wish that Browning could be back here to “do” a few people right now. What a study he would make of Hitler!

Professor Conkling’s assessment holds true today, for Browning still has much to say to
us. In looking back at Browning, he can help us to think about our present moment and to
envision the future. Indeed, Browning believed this to be the role of the poet. Browning exclaimed in his famous “Essay on Shelley” that when “the world is found to be subsisting wholly on the shadow of a reality, on sentiments diluted from passions, on the tradition of a fact, the convention of a moral, the straw of last year’s harvest” there is a need for the poet to “replace this intellectual rumination of food swallowed long ago, by a supply of the fresh and living swathe.” This requires a poet to interpret the present in light of the past and to fashion the forms of the future, which is something Browning admired in Percy Shelley, writing in “Popularity”: “My poet holds the future fast, / Accepts the coming ages’ duty, / Their present for this past.”

Our President, as both a poet and a lover of Browning, has fused the creative and the
critical to shape the new direction of the society. The Browning Society’s annual poetry competition, held in over one hundred and twenty schools, has introduced young people to Browning’s work, ensured his inclusion in the high school curriculum, and incited a passion for poetry in the young adults who are our future civilians and leaders. In order to continue this goal, the Browning Society is striving to make itself more accessible to a younger generation of members, and we hope to expand our reach in the future by offering additional evening meetings.

Browning scholarship continues to attest to Browning’s striking modernity. Hédi A.Jaouad, who has previously presented his work to the Browning Society of New York, has recently published a groundbreaking new book, Browning on Arabia: A Movable East, with Palgrave Macmillan. As we grapple with the legacy of nineteenth-century politics on the Middle East, Jaouad’s book is a timely reminder of Browning’s progressive views. Below I excerpt the abstract for this engaging new study, which can be purchased on Amazon or through the Palgrave website.

Browning Upon Arabia charts Robert Browning’s early and enduring engagement with the East, particularly the Arab East. This book highlights the complexities of Browning’s poetry, revealing Browning’s resistance to triumphalist and imperialist forms of Orientalism generated by many
nineteenth-century British and European literary and scholarly portrayals of the East. Hédi A. Jaouad argues that Browning extensively researched the literature, history, philosophy, and culture of the East to produce poetry that is sensitive to its Eastern resources and devoted to confirming the interrelation of Northern and Eastern knowledge in pursuit of a new form of 
transcendental humanism.

We are fortunate to have Tom d’Egidio, a noted poet, as the speaker for our October meeting, where he will address another fascinating facet of Browning’s life and work. D’Egidio, who is currently working on a memoir of 80s Downtown Manhattan called “Basquiat Requiem,” will explore the Brownings’ relationship to Florence, in a talk that raises complex issues of identity,
politics, and history. Please find the below the abstract for this exciting presentation:

In 1846 Elizabeth and Robert Browning eloped to Italy, spending most of the time until Elizabeth’s 1861 death living in Florence. Elizabeth had been a lifelong Italophile who had written poems in Italian while still in England. Yet during all their Florentine years they essentially had no Italian friends, living exclusively within the English colony wryly referred to by some, as Tuscanyshire. Although they were generally in accord with the ongoing struggle for Italian unification, their greatest interest, especially on Robert’s part, was in Italy’s past. They were both highly taken by the Italian literature and art of yesteryear, at the precise moment when the Swiss historian Jakob Burckhardt was in Italy formulating for the first time the concept of what we now refer to as the Renaissance, a period whose artists and princes fascinated Robert to the point of utterly transforming his poetry. In going to live in Italy, Robert was following the example of his hero Shelley whom he otherwise resembled neither as poet nor in personality. Whereas Shelley struck those who knew him as the personification of Renaissance individuality, Browning’s surprisingly banal conventionality led his friend Henry James to portray him as a doppelganger straight out of Edgar Allan Poe. What were the complex reasons the Brownings had for going to Italy and what was the effect on their poetry of living there? What did Robert Browning in particular find in Italy that enabled him to become a great poet?
What was really going on in Tuscanyshire?

We look forward to seeing you at the October meeting and to an exciting new season. Please look out for our November newsletter to learn more about James Browning Kepple’s discussion of Browning’s mysterious poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.”