Their difference from the old epic poets is the whole difference between an age that fought with dragons and an age that fights with microbes.
This tide of the importance of small things is flowing so steadily around us upon every side to-day, that we do not sufficiently realise that if there was one man in English literary history who might with justice be called its fountain and origin, that man was Robert Browning.

When Browning arose, literature was entirely in the hands of the Tennysonian poet.

The Tennysonian poet does indeed mention trivialities, but he mentions them when he wishes to speak trivially; Browning mentions trivialities when he wishes to speak sensationally.
Now this sense of the terrible importance of detail was a sense which may be said to have possessed Browning in the emphatic manner of a demoniac possession.

Sane as he was, this one feeling might have driven him to a condition not far from madness.

Any room that he was sitting in glared at him with innumerable eyes and mouths gaping with a story.