A brief history of the sonnet - Chapter 11 (The Victorian Age and Elizabeth Barrett Browning)

 Where did Arnold say that Shelley is "in poetry, no less than in life, a beautiful and ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain"?

 In his Essays in  Criticism, of course. But while he makes Shelley sound asexual and as if that is a crime, the fact is Arnold's blind spot is the same as Samuel Johnson's in that in both their lives of the poets, or essays on the poets, and their reckoning of poets who matter no Veronica Franco exists or E B Browning who was Arnold's contemporary.  Women exist for them only as muses, realistic, or idealistic, or fantastic, or as a bias, or as objects of desire. This is true not only of these two great critics but also of the poets I mentioned whether Dante with his Bice or Cavalcanti with his two women, or Petrarca with his Laura - only Michaelangelo standing apart, but homoeroticism can also be threatening to women in a patriarchy if allied to power - or Spenser or Sidney or Shakespeare with his dark lady, or Keats with his Fanny or Wordsworth with his mother's breasts fixation which he transfers to Nature the nurturer or Robert Browning with his talk of Raphael with his lost sonnets on Margherita and Dante's sketch of an angel.  Milton and Shelley have more balls than all of them, they write as men for a man's world. We have to wait till the Victorian age for the emergence of an Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and an Emily Bronte and a Christina Rosetti, the same way as in the history of the novel we had to wait for a Jane Austen to shine forth to rival her men competitors by showing them she could not only take a leaf from the form of the novel but also do a better job at it. Emily Bronte's sonnets, and the Sonnets to the Portugese remain classics of the form even today. 

43.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and Ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise;
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith;
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

We have here an authentic voice that reminds us of one of Shakespeare's sonnets again.

Sonnet 30

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear times’ waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unus’d to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night.
And weep afresh love’s long-since cancell’d woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight.
Then can I grieve at grievance foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
  But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
  All losses are restor’d, and sorrows end.

What is amazing here is measure for measure Elizabeth Barrett Browning matches Shakespeare, 

according to me, putting to rest the idle speculation of whether writing is gender centred, it isn't. Writers 

can write well in any tongue, whether men or women, and it really has nothing to do with their sex or 

gender which is where Arnold got it wrong and so do many others, it has to do with their ability to 

express themselves effectively in language, their literary and lingguistic intelligence, to quote 

Howard Gardner, which is why here Shakespeare's sonnet makes a deep 

impact as friendship is a theme that is asexual and here E B B scores as well as anybody else, 

while also being centred on her self and pointing out that for a woman what matters is not 

being the object of desire  or being a muse but being  the one to give love and of being stable in love, 

her love being an "ever fixed mark", yet unique to herself so not generalized though it can be

universalized if she wants it to be.

This chapter toasts E B B, not her remarkable love story, or the woman seen through Robert Browning's 

eyes, but the woman who celebrated her power in writing great poetry with her unforgettable sonnets to 

the Portugese, lending lustre to world and English or Victorian literature, along with Mary Ann Evans 

(George Eliot),  Charlotte  Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anne Bronte, and others I already mentioned up 

above.

Eleven chapters into this exercise, thus, I would like to point out that my essays show there is scope for 

doing research on all these poets or their sonnets and their forms and sequences even today, it is not done

with and finished, unlike what people think, in terms of all the modern literary theories including 

feminism, now, the theories that come from ecocriticism (Wordsworth, of course)  onwards.

What is refreshing about Browning, E B here is that she is no longer anyone's muse or goddess or temptress 

or sexual fantasy or object of desire or ridicule but a poet in her own right outside the gaze of men 

and looking at herself, at how she loves and  that is the beginning of a new world and revolutionary even 

if she looks at love naturally, as a noble  cause, conditioned by her time and place, like all her fellow "men"

poets before her, and those who are her contemporaries.

https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780191826719.001.0001/q-oro-ed4-00010031S

https://poets.org/poem/how-do-i-love-thee-sonnet-43

https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/shakespeare/when_to_sessions.html