Extreme cleverness is no safeguard

From By no means roses, roses all the way by Philip Hensher In The Spectator, January 10, 2004.  A review of Browning: A Private Life by Iain Finlayson

These early poems are certainly hard going, and often faintly absurd — for me, a poem-drama like Paracelsus is killed stone dead by the memory of ‘Savonarola Brown’; large stretches of it scan beautifully, saying nothing much at great length. Despite their sophistication, there is a curious naivety about them, summed up by a ludicrous feature at the end of Pippa Passes:

Then, owls and bats,

Cowls and twats,

Monks and nuns, in a cloister’s moods

Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!

Browning, with all his immense learning, was still under the impression that ‘twat’ was the name for an item of nun’s headgear. When the OED, much later in his life, wrote to inquire why he thought that, he kindly sent them a passage from an old poem he’d found —‘They’d talked of his having a cardinal’s hat,/ They’d send him as soon an old nun’s twat.’ Which just goes to show — the awful story is passed over in silence by Iain Finlayson — that extreme cleverness is no safeguard.