How does Robert Browning’s blank verse differ from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s?

While both Robert Browning and Alfred Lord Tennyson utilized blank verse to render the accents of natural speech in their dramatic lyrics, their prosodic styles were fundamentally different.1

Tennyson’s blank verse is characterized by:
* Smoothly modulated vowel music.1
* Careful use of spondaic substitutions.1
* Unambiguous adherence to pentameter regularity.1
* An ultimate stylistic model in the oratorical, Baroque prosody of John Milton.1

In contrast, Browning’s blank verse aims for colloquial vigour. While he consistently obeys the formal metrical law, he adjusts the abstract pattern to mirror the rhythms of dramatic speech. His style is defined by:1
* Strong accents and pregnant caesuras.1
* Involuted syntax.1
* A sense of headlong energy.1
* A stylistic model derived from the quick, nervous blank verse of later Elizabethan dramatists.1

Ultimately, Browning’s "irregularity" is not a violation of meter but a deliberate technique to capture the broken, complex rhythms of individual human speech.12