Browning's Sordello and the Aesthetics of Difficulty

Book excerpt: Browning's Sordello has often been regarded as teh ultimate difficult poem, at least until its twentieth-century successors. It is also usually seen as an anomalous freak of literary history. Browning's early masterwork can be understood best, however, as a mature extension of the poetics of its time, as well as a late-Romantic attempt to write an epical work which must be read both willfully and imaginatively.