Painting the Globe with Wings: Sculpture and the Aesthetics of Realism in <i>Aurora Leigh</i>

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's debt to British Romanticism is well known, yet the influence of early German Romantic ideas on her poetics has been largely overlooked. In this essay, I show how Barrett Browning draws upon August Wilhelm Schlegel's comparison between sculpture and painting – representing classical and romantic art, respectively – as a framework for conceptualising Aurora and Carrington's move towards realism and for critiquing Romney's social theories, which are equated with the static forms of French neoclassical art. I contend that in framing Aurora and Carrington's artistic development in the context of Schlegel's theory, Barrett Browning locates her verse novel in the tradition of romantic art that the early German Romantics saw as culminating in the ‘infinite realism’ of the Roman (novel). This aesthetic theory, I argue, allowed Barrett Browning to stake a claim for the poet of transcendental vision in political, social, and economic affairs.