A Few Thoughts on the Dramatic Monologue
A Few Thoughts on the Dramatic Monologue
A dramatic monologue is a poem written in the voice of a specific, definite character who is not the poet: the speaker is a persona, a mask. It’s a monologue because it has only one speaker, though there is sometimes (as in Browning’s “My Last Duchess”) a silent interlocutor whose unheard (or unread) responses help shape the speaker’s discourse and the meaning of the poem. (In such poems addressed to a specific listener, though only one person speaks, both the speaker’s and the listener’s point of view are inscribed into the poem.) It’s dramatic because it’s as if spoken by a character in a play, “a poem which seems to be a speech taken from some dramatic encounter between an imagined character and someone he or she addresses” (who may, as in a soliloquy, be him or herself, or even no one) (Shira Wolosky, The Art of Poetry: How to Read a Poem). By revealing a character in the context of a dramatic situation (a “soul in action”), a dramatic monologue provides knowledge not just about the speaker’s personality, but about the time, the setting, key events, and other characters involved in the situation at hand, even if they are not present.
The modern dramatic monologue, in the manner of Tennyson’s “Ulysses” or “Tithonus,” is often as much about the varying emotions of a single mind as about a specific dramatic situation—that is to say, it overlaps a great deal with the personal lyric, except that the person in question is a persona, explicitly not the poet. One critic has called many modern dramatic monologues “mask lyrics” (“persona” means “mask” in Latin), as they often involve the poet assuming another identity in order to more powerfully or directly express his or her own emotions through the safety of dramatic distance. As Browning (who called his poems in this form “dramatic lyrics,” emphasizing the blurring of genre boundaries) wrote, “I’ll tell my state as though ’twere none of mine.” Expressing one’s own emotions
A dramatic monologue is a poem written in the voice of a specific, definite character who is not the poet: the speaker is a persona, a mask. It’s a monologue because it has only one speaker, though there is sometimes (as in Browning’s “My Last Duchess”) a silent interlocutor whose unheard (or unread) responses help shape the speaker’s discourse and the meaning of the poem. (In such poems addressed to a specific listener, though only one person speaks, both the speaker’s and the listener’s point of view are inscribed into the poem.) It’s dramatic because it’s as if spoken by a character in a play, “a poem which seems to be a speech taken from some dramatic encounter between an imagined character and someone he or she addresses” (who may, as in a soliloquy, be him or herself, or even no one) (Shira Wolosky, The Art of Poetry: How to Read a Poem). By revealing a character in the context of a dramatic situation (a “soul in action”), a dramatic monologue provides knowledge not just about the speaker’s personality, but about the time, the setting, key events, and other characters involved in the situation at hand, even if they are not present.
The modern dramatic monologue, in the manner of Tennyson’s “Ulysses” or “Tithonus,” is often as much about the varying emotions of a single mind as about a specific dramatic situation—that is to say, it overlaps a great deal with the personal lyric, except that the person in question is a persona, explicitly not the poet. One critic has called many modern dramatic monologues “mask lyrics” (“persona” means “mask” in Latin), as they often involve the poet assuming another identity in order to more powerfully or directly express his or her own emotions through the safety of dramatic distance. As Browning (who called his poems in this form “dramatic lyrics,” emphasizing the blurring of genre boundaries) wrote, “I’ll tell my state as though ’twere none of mine.” Expressing one’s own emotions