Hello and welcome to a brand new series of Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast. This week, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who lived from 1806 to 1861, and who in Victorian times was a very famous and successful, much-loved Poe.

I know what you're thinking, isn't she the wife of Robert Browning, who was the real star of the show?

Well, fight your prejudices, that's what I say, because that was not the case when they were both around, and he was very much the second poetic fiddle to Elizabeth.

So, let's get that out of the way early, just to give you a hint of biography. She was one of those kids.

We see it so often with poets and writers, Samuel Johnson, Alexander Pope. She was a prodigy and largely self-taught.

So, she just sat in her dad's library, soaking stuff up, and by her early teens, she was reading all the classics in the original language, Latin, Greek, but also reading the Old Testament in Hebrew, so she was a brain.

She also, during that period, read a lot of the more radical writers, like Walst and Croft, and vindication of the rights of women.

Tom Payne writing about the revolution in America, Rousseau Voltaire, the great stars of the French Enlightenment, and so she was pretty groovy in her teens.

But then she got ill, and that thing happened that sometimes occurs when people get ill, is there is a strange silver lining to it,

during which they spend all of their time writing, reading, writing, just learning their art, because their physical pursuits are somewhat limited.

You'll remember when we talked about Emily Dickinson, the American poet, that she got ill, stayed in her bedroom most of the time, and just churned out poem after poem.

I once worked with Goulton and Simpson, the creators of the Hancock shows, Tony Hancock's very successful shows, and of Stepton's son, and they had met, I think, in a TB ward, and they were confined to their hospital beds, and just made up jokes and ideas for stories, and so on.

So there can be a plus to illness, that's the lesson of today's podcast.

By the way, Emily Dickinson had a framed picture of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her bedroom, which shows the level of her celebrity in the 19th century.

So, okay, she brought out a book of poetry in 1944, it got great reviews, she became a famous poet, and then she got a fan letter from a guy called Robert Browning, at this point she was still Elizabeth Barrett, and he said, and I quote,

I love your verses with all my heart, and he said lots of other praising things. So they met up in 1945, you can guess it, they fell in love, her father disapproved, because he was a struggling playwright, his Robert Browning was a struggling playwright and poet, and Mr. Barrett thought he was a bit of a loser, so they had to marry in secret, and then they went off to Italy, to live partly for Elizabeth's health.

And partly to get away from the old man, Elizabeth, and was one of those creatives who used lording them, which was an opium based medicine for her pain,

Colrich, you may know, used it a lot, and some people think that was part of a poetic inspiration, never quite sure about drugs as inspiration myself.

People I know have really got into that kind of thing tend to create nothing, but that's maybe just my narrow experience.

So she was six years older and on well, but they loved each other, and she wrote, actually at that time, I will get to the poem in a minute by the way.

She wrote a sonnet, she had a collection called Sonnets from the Portuguese, and she wrote a poem you may have heard of, a sonnet, how do I love the, let me count the ways?

I know I use the term famous very guardedly on these podcasts because poetry isn't that famous generally, but that is a big check it out.

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