The history of criticism is largely the history of the changing questions we ask about works of art. The pre-eminence in our time of Yeats, Eliot, and Joyce, and the connection of these writers with an artistic method and a mode of thought that Eliot, in reviewing Joyce's Ulysses, has himself called mythical—all this leads me to ask about Browning's use of myth. The question seems particularly relevant since Yeats and Browning had in common an intense admiration for Shelley. Now Yeats, we know, admired not Shelley the Godwinian radical, but Shelley the Platonist and mythmaker—the Shelley who, in the manner of Blake, used archetypal symbols. The question is whether Browning—who did for a time admire Shelley the Godwinian radical—had affinities also with Shelley the mythmaker and (the two terms are inextricably connected) symbolist.