Robert Browning wrote poetry.
Browning Society . Emerging from various reading groups , the societies were an indication of the poet 's fame and , unusually , were actively forming during his lifetime . Robert Browning . 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 . Such Browning Societies remained common in Britain and the United States until the early 20th century .