SOURCE: Introduction to Modern Critical Views: Robert Browning, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1985, pp. 1-21.

In the following essay, Bloom explores the tendency of Browning's critics to misread the nature of the epiphanies and the "visions-of-failure" in Browning's poetry, noting that epiphanies are often wrongfully interpreted as negative events, while "visions-of-failure" are mistakenly read as celebrations.

One of the principles of interpretation that will arise out of the future study of the intricacies of poetic revisionism, and of the kinds of misreading that canon-formation engenders, is the realization that later poets and their critical followers tend to misread strong precursors by a fairly consistent mistaking of literal for figurative, and of figurative for literal. Browning misread the High Romantics, and particularly his prime precursor, Shelley, in this pattern, and through time's revenges most modern poets and critics have done and are doing the same to Browning...