Jane Clark Scharl delivers artful truths in Sonnez Les Matines
From our US edition
As preface to his verse play King Victor and King Charles (1842), Robert Browning made a striking assertion about the claims poetry has on truth. In dramatizing King Victor Amadeus II of Sardinia’s abdication and subsequent attempt at re-accession, Browning said, he had produced a “statement” on the subject “more true to person and thing than any it has hitherto been my fortune to meet with.” Naturally, that “statement” — peculiar word for poetry — differs considerably from the historical record. Yet the merits Browning ascribes to his version — not surpassing beauty, but truth to “person” and “thing” — we would tend to call prosaic, the province of history or science or some other species of nonfiction.
