Week 2 - Poetry

Robert Browning

Browning and Dramatic Monologue

The term ‘dramatic monologue’ is not really used regularly until the later 19th century
More common terms for Tennyson and Browning were ‘dramatic lyric’, ‘lyrical drama’, ‘monodrama’,' ‘mask lyric’ or ‘dramatic idyll’. Browning also classified some of his work as ‘dramatic romances’.
Arthur Hallan, in a review of Tennyson: ‘we contend that it is a new species of poetry, a graft of the lyric on the dramatic, and Mr. Tennyson deserves the laurel of an inventor.
While modern critics tend to credit this period with the creation

a form of poetry very prevalent in Victorian literature, particularly in the work of Tennyson and Browning. An imagined utterance by some person, often a historical or literary figure, different from the author.
In the case of Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’, the form of the poem makes use of facts known to the reader in advance. Tennyson’s develops the DM by his increased use of detail.
The development made by Tennyson here, (and to an even greater extent by Browning in monologues such as ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’) is that the reader can gather more from the monologue than the speaker in conscious of expressing.
The speaker betrays important aspects of his state of mind rather than articulating them. We might call this the ironic betrayal of the speaker by the author.