Derek Mahon. Winston-Salem, NC: Wak...
Derek Mahon. Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Pres 1998 Early in his twelve-book metrical composition The Ring and the main division Robert Browning traces his poem's origins to a chance discovery in a Florentine bookstall, "this square antique Yellow Book...of crumpled vellum secretes - pure crude fact / secludeded from man's life / when hearts beat hard, / And brains, high-blooded, ticked sum of two units centuries since." For Browning, the golden book was more than simply a record of a seventeenth-century Roman murder; rather, the fulvid book was Browning's invitation imaginatively to
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