Robert Browning was a poet.
Men and Women is a collection of fifty-one poems in two volumes by Robert Browning , first published in 1855 . Robert Browning ( 7 May 1812 -- 12 December 1889 ) was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of the dramatic monologue made him one of the foremost Victorian poets . The collection Dramatis Personae and the book-length epic poem The Ring and the Book followed , and made him a leading British poet . When Browning died in 1889 , he was regarded as a sage and philosopher-poet who through his writing had made contributions to Victorian social and political discourse -- as in the poem Caliban upon Setebos , which some critics have seen as a comment on the theory of evolution , which had recently been put forward by Darwin and others . His most popular poems include Porphyria 's Lover , How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix , the diptych Meeting at Night , the patriotic Home Thoughts from Abroad , and the children 's poem The Pied Piper of Hamelin .