SOURCE: Menaghan, John M. “Embodied Truth: The Ring and the Book Reconsidered.” University of Toronto Quarterly 52, no. 3 (spring 1983): 263-76.

In the following essay, Menaghan outlines and responds to the various controversies surrounding The Ring and the Book and elucidates Browning's goals for the poem.

Man can embody truth, but he cannot know it. 

W. B. Yeats

I

Anyone reviewing the critical literature surrounding Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book is likely to be led at some point to ask why, given what critics assume to be Browning's goals for the poem, he seems to have taken such a peculiar, clotted, and roundabout path to their realization. If the poem is designed to convince us, say, of Pompilia's innocence, why has the poet built in so many elements that distract us not just from a conviction of such innocence but even from any steady concern with seeing it...