Scholars at a lecture: Harvard University (1736-7).
There are principally two ways to read EBB's sonnets. One way is to see her sonnet sequence as autobiographical-- as personal expressions of her love. Certainly this is a rather convincing way to read the love poems, given the biographical facts that correlate her writing of the sonnets to her courtship with Robert Browning. Julia Markus and William S. Peterson have published a book in which the sonnets are individually printed side by side with corresponding letters from Elizabeth and Robert. The editors state their purpose as the following:
Although the link between the letters and the sonnets has often been alluded to, the imagery of the sonnets has generally been compared to Shakespeare's and the Italian form of the sonnet sequence to Petrarch's. There has been no concentration on the fact that it was her "life in a new rhythm" that she was celebrating and that the idiom of the sequence is inspired mainly by her own experience of awakened love, often in the imagery of the love letters....The verbal echoes-- at times sad, witty, erotic-- between the poems and the lovers' letters will be apparent and will allow readers to glean for themselves the living context out of which these poems arose." (Sonnets from the Portuguese, Illuminated by the Brownings' Love Letters, ed. Julia Markus and William S. Peterson (New Jersey: Ecco Press, 1996)).
Markus and Peterson believe that EBB truly was inspired by her new found sense of love, and it is difficult not to see the correlation in diction between the letters and the sonnets. Yet, at the same time, this reading can become rather narrow in terms of literary scope.
Other writers such as Shaakeh S. Agajanian, in "Sonnets From the Portuguese" and the Love Sonnet Tradition (New York: Philosophical Library, 1985), strongly oppose reading the sonnets autobiographically, and see this approach as "obscuring the genuineness of the sonnets and demoting the poet to the inferior rank of a servant 'in the mansion of literature'" (14). Agajanian opts for a much more comparative approach, while arguing against strictly biographical assumptions. Agajanian analyzes the ways in which the poems either ascribe to the ideas of love in literary traditions or deviate from them. For example, her commentary on "Sonnet 1" begins:
The sequence opens, very appropriately, with an Annunciation scene similar in its physical setting to the medieval and early Renaissance paintings of the event. The beloved is portrayed as sitting alone-- musing over the passage of the "sweet sad years" of her past life-- in a posture that suggests both the resistant petulance of Martini's Virgin and the meditative pose of Fra Angelico's representation.
The strong draw of the critic towards a visual comparison at the beginning of the analysis is worth noting, though Agajanian then delves into parsing out themes and conflicts laid out in the poem (i.e. the lover as resister, Calvinistic undertones of predestination, etc.).
My belief is that EBB's sonnets need to be read somewhere in between the two approaches. If we are to take EBB as the serious Poet she considered herself, given the breadth of her literary knowledge, her passion for poetry, and her obvious popularity in 19th-century England and America (and arguably, today), then it is useful to trace literary influences on her style, form, and treatment of subject matter, as well as tracing what it is about her poems that makes them Victorian. On the other hand, the "Romantic" reading of EBB is not without merit either, and much valuable analysis can result from understanding EBB's personal quest as a Poet within her society.