His most important innovation in form was his device of the dramatic lyric.  What interested him in life was men and women, and in them, not their actions, but the motives which governed their actions.  To lay bare fully the working of motive in a narrative form with himself as narrator was obviously impossible; the strict dramatic form, though he attained some success in it, does not seem to have attracted him, probably because in it the ultimate stress must be on the thing done rather than the thing thought; there remained, therefore, of the ancient forms of poetry, the lyric.  The lyric had of course been used before to express emotions imagined and not real to the poet himself; Browning was the first to project it to express imagined emotions of men and women, whether typical or individual, whom he himself had created.  Alongside this perversion of the lyric, he created a looser and freer form, the dramatic monologue, in which most of his most famous poems, Cleon, Sludge the Medium, Bishop Blougram’s Apology, etc., are cast.  In the convention which Browning established in it, all kinds of people are endowed with a miraculous articulation, a new gift of tongues; they explain themselves, their motives, the springs of those motives (for in Browning’s view every thought and act of a man’s life is part of an interdependent whole), and their author’s peculiar and robust philosophy of life.  Out of the dramatic monologues he devised the scheme of The Ring and the Book, a narrative poem in which the episodes, and not the plot, are the basis of the structure, and the story of a trifling and sordid crime is set forth as it appeared to the minds of the chief actors in succession.  To these new forms he added the originality of an extraordinary realism in style.  Few poets have the power by a word, a phrase, a flash of observation in detail to make you see the event as Browning makes you see it.

Many books have been written on the philosophy of Browning’s poetry.  Stated briefly its message is that of an optimism which depends on a recognition of the strenuousness of life.  The base of his creed, as of Carlyle’s, is the gospel of labour; he believes in the supreme moral worth of effort.  Life is a “training school” for a future existence, and our place in it depends on the courage and strenuousness with which we have laboured here.  Evil is in the world only as an instrument in the process of development; by conquering it we exercise our spiritual faculties the more.  Only torpor is the supreme sin, even as in The Statue and the Bust where effort would have been to a criminal end.

“The counter our lovers staked was lost
 As surely as if it were lawful coin: 
 And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost
 Was, the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin,
 Though the end in sight was a crime, I say.”

All the other main ideas of his poetry fit with perfect consistency on to his scheme.  Love, the manifestation of a man’s or a woman’s nature, is the highest and most intimate relationship possible, for it is an opportunity—­the highest opportunity—­for spiritual growth.  It can reach this end though an actual and earthly union is impossible.