SOURCE: Robinson, David. “Christopher Pearse Cranch, Robert Browning, and the Problem of ‘Transcendental’ Friendship.” Studies in the American Renaissance (1977): 145-53.

In the following essay, Robinson examines Cranch's friendship with Robert Browning and its effect on Cranch's poetry.

The thirty year interval between Christopher Pearse Cranch's first collection of verse, Poems (1844), and the successive publications of Satan (1874) and The Bird and the Bell (1875)¹ is marked by many apparent changes in a man characterized as one of the most restless of the Transcendentalists.² Much of this period was spent overseas, where Cranch, in the company of numerous other American intellectuals, was establishing himself as a successful, if not brilliant, landscape painter, and somewhat later in America, as an accomplished translator of the Aeneid.³ But the themes to which he returned in his later poetry are remarkably similar to those of the early poems which won the praise of Emerson, and...