2. Read "Robert Browning" by Oscar Wilde. Taken as a whole the man was great. He did not belong to the Olympians, and had all the incompleteness of the Titan. He did not survey, and it was but rarely that he could sing. His work is marred
by struggle, violence and effort, and he passed not from emotion to form, but from thought to chaos. Still, he was great. He has been called a thinker, and was certainly a man who was always
thinking, and always thinking aloud; but it was not thought that fascinated him, but rather the processes by which thought moves. It was the machine he loved, not what the machine makes. The
method by which the fool arrives at his folly was as dear to him as the ultimate wisdom of the wise. So much, indeed, did the subtle mechanism of mind fascinate him that he despised language, or
looked upon it as an incomplete instrument of expression. Rhyme, that exquisite echo which in the Muse's hollow hill creates and answers its own voice; rhyme, which in the hands of the real artist
becomes not merely a material element of metrical beauty, but a spiritual element of thought and passion also, waking a new mood, it may be, or stirring a fresh train of ideas, or opening by mere
sweetness and suggestion of sound some golden door at which the Imagination itself had knocked in vain; thyme, which can turn man's utterance to the speech of gods; rhyme, the one chord we
have added to the Greek lyre, became in Robert Browning's hands a grotesque, misshapen thing, which at times made him masquerade in poetry as a low comedian, and ride Pegasus too often with
his tongue in his cheek.
Works Cited
Wilde, Oscar. "Robert Browning." Methuen and Co. 1914.
Wilde uses all of the following techniques in his prose poetry to impact the reader, except:
Orhythm
O metaphor
repetition
descriptive language