Twenty years ago interest in Browning's poetry, in England at any rate, was at a low ebb: both Eliot and Leavis had pronounced against him. The first stirrings came with Robert Langbaum's The Poetry of Experience (1957), which raised problems about the moral and epistemological aspects of the dramatic monologues. There followed in the sixties a series of books and articles reaffirming the centrality of The Ring and the Book* for the Browning canon. As a result of this “revaluation” some of the earlier long narratives, in particular Paracelsus and Sordello* received critical reappraisal. The Oxford University Press saw fit to issue a revised edition of Browning's poems from 1833 to 1864 edited by Ian Jack (1970), and Penguin filled a useful gap with its publication in 1971 of The Ring and the Book.