Dramatic monologue

A 'dramatic monologue' is a piece of spoken verse that offers great insight into the
feelings of the speaker.
Not to be confused with a soliloquy in a play (which the character speaking speaks to
themselves), dramatic monologues suggest an auditor or auditors. They were favored by
many poets in the Victorian period, in which a character in fiction or in history delivers a
speech explaining his or her feelings, actions, or motives.
The monologue is usually directed toward a silent audience, with the speaker's words
influenced by a critical situation. An example of a dramatic monologue exists in My Last
Duchess by Robert Browning, when a duke speaks to an emissary of his way,

"Porphyria's Lover" also by Robert Browning,

"The Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team" by Carol Ann Duffy,

"Lady Lazarus" by Sylvia Plath.

In a general way, the dramatic tradition as a whole may have influenced the style of the
monologue. Indeed, the style of the dramatic monologue, which attempts to evoke an
entire story through representing part of it, may be called an endeavor to turn into poetry
many of the distinctive features of drama.

Contents

1 Features of the Dramatic Monologue

2 Types of monologues
3 The Victorian Period
4 See also
5 References

6 Sources

Features of the Dramatic Monologue

M. H. Abrams notes the following three features of the dramatic monologue:
1. A single person, who is patently not the poet, utters the speech that makes up the whole
of the poem, in a specific situation at a critical moment [].
2. This person addresses and interacts with one or more other people; but we know of the
auditors' presence, and what they say and do, only from clues in the discourse of the
single speaker.

3. The main principle controlling the poet's choice and formulation of what the lyric speaker
says is to reveal to the reader, in a way that enhances its interest, the speaker's
temperament and character.[1]

Types of monologues
One of the most important influences on the development of the dramatic monologue are
the Romantic poets. The long, personal lyrics typical of the Romantic period are not
dramatic monologues, in the sense that they do not, for the most part, imply a
concentrated narrative. However, poems such as William Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey
and Percy Bysshe Shelley's Mont Blanc, to name two famous examples, offered a model
of close psychological observation described in a specific setting.
The novel, and plays have also been important influences on the dramatic monologue,
particularly as a means of characterisation.
Dramatic monologues are a way of expressing the views of a character and offering
the audience greater insight into that character's feelings.

The Victorian Period

The Victorian period represented the high point of the dramatic monologue in English
poetry.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Ulysses, published in 1842, has been called the first true
dramatic monologue. After Ulysses, Tennyson's most famous efforts in this vein
are Tithonus, The Lotus Eaters, and St. Simon Stylites, all from the 1842 Poems;
later monologues appear in other volumes, notably Idylls of the King.

Robert Browning is usually credited with perfecting the form; certainly, Browning
is the poet who, above all, produced his finest and most famous work in this form.
While My Last Duchess is the most famous of his monologues, the form
dominated his writing career. Fra Lippo Lippi, Caliban upon Setebos, Soliloquy
of the Spanish Cloister and Porphyria's Lover, as well as the other poems in Men
and Women are just a handful of Browning's monologues.

Other Victorian poets also used the form. Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote several, including
Jenny and The Blessed Damozel; Christina Rossetti wrote a number, including The
Convent Threshold. Algernon Swinburne's Hymn to Proserpine has been called a
dramatic monologue vaguely reminiscent of Browning's work.

Poetic Technique: Dramatic Monologue

Dramatic monologue in poetry, also known as a persona poem, shares many
characteristics with a theatrical monologue: an audience is implied; there is no dialogue;
and the poet speaks through an assumed voicea character, a fictional identity, or a
persona.
Because a dramatic monologue is by definition one persons speech, it is offered without
overt analysis or commentary, placing emphasis on subjective qualities that are left to
the audience to interpret.
Though the technique is evident in many ancient Greek dramas, the dramatic monologue
as a poetic form achieved its first era of distinction in the work of Victorian poet Robert
Browning.
Brownings poems "My Last Duchess" and "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister," though
considered largely inscrutable by Victorian readers, have become models of the form.
His monologues combine the elements of the speaker and the audience so deftly that the
reader seems to have some control over how much the speaker will divulge in his
monologue. This complex relationship is evident in the following excerpt from "My
Last Duchess":
Even had you skill
In speech(which I have not)to make your will
Quite clear to such an one, and say, 'Just this
Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
Or there exceed the mark' -- and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse,
E'en then would be some stooping...
In the twentieth century, the influence of Brownings monologues can be seen in the
work of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.
In Eliots "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," readers find the voice of the poet
cloaked in a mask, a technique that Eliot mastered in his career. More recently, a number
of poets have offered variations on the form, including "Mirror" and "Lady Lazarus" by
Sylvia Plath, and "Daffy Duck in Hollywood" by John Ashbery. John Berryman used
the form in his series of Dream Songs, writing poems with shifting narrators, including
his alter egos "Henry" and "Mr. Bones."

One powerful example of the interplay between a dramatic monologue and the
perception of the audience is "Night, Death, Mississippi," by Robert Hayden. In the
poem, Hayden adopts the shocking persona of an aging Klan member, listening
longingly to the sounds of a lynching outside, but too feeble to join. He says to himself:
Christ, it was better
than hunting bear
which dont know why
you want him dead.
The effect of reading the casual violence of the poem is more devastating than any
commentary the poet could have provided. Hayden wrote many other dramatic
monologue poems, including several dramatizing African American historical figures
such as Phillis Wheatley and Nat Turner, as well as inventive characters such as the
alien voice reporting his observations in "American Journal."
Though not written in the first person, James Dickey's long poem "Falling" is inspired
by a true story, and offers the impossible narrative of a stewardess who is accidentally
blown from a plane and falls helplessly to the ground. The poem is voiced by an
omniscient speaker who seems to fly invisibly beside her, observing her calm descent,
her twists and tumbles, listening as she imagines herself as a goddess looking for water
to dive into, and then finally watching as she removes her clothes, unsnapping her bra
and sliding out of her girdle, before finally coming to rest in a Kansas field. Dickey
transforms this terrifying reality into sensual transcendence, as he writes: "Her last
superhuman act the last slow careful passing of her hands / All over her unharmed body
desired by every sleeper in his dream."