Robert Browning was a poet.
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 long poem Pauline brought him to the attention of Dante Gabriel Rossetti , and was followed by Paracelsus , which was praised by William Wordsworth and Charles Dickens , but in 1840 the difficult Sordello , which was seen as wilfully obscure , brought his poetry into disrepute . Unusually for a poet , societies for the study of his work were founded while he was still alive .