Decomposing Robert

In this long poem, David Spittle seeks to mirror the decomposition of the human body with the decomposition and syntactical entropy of language itself, in the same way Wittgenstein’s early philosophy attempted to mirror the structure of reality with the structure of language. Interspersing fragments from Robert Browning’s own poetry into his own and seemingly interweaving his visions with those of the Victorian poet, Spittle ingeniously exhumes not just the meaning of Browning’s own life and writing, but also the remains of that life’s meaning for us today – poetry helping record, like an involuntary seismograph, the thoughts and actions of any one life on earth. Thus, the poet tackles the problem of how a human lifespan can be both mentally and linguistically deconstructed within the very body that housed that existence in the first place.​