1812–1889 · English poet, master of the dramatic monologue
Robert Browning spent much of his career out of fashion, writing knotty, talky poems in the voices of other people — painters, bishops, murderers — while his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning was the famous one in the household. Men and Women (1855), the two-volume collection that contains “Andrea del Sarto,” landed with a thud on first publication and is now considered his best book. His speciality was the dramatic monologue: a character talks, and gives himself away without meaning to. That is exactly what happens in the line everyone now quotes.