The Dramatic Monologue and Related Lyric Forms

Abstract

most distinctive and highly valued poems of the modern era offer an image of a dramatized I acting in a concrete setting. variety and importance of the poems which fall under this description are suggested simply by the mention of such names as Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, Tintern Abbey, Ode to a Nightingale, Ulysses, My Last Duchess, Dover Beach, The Windhover, The Darkling Thrush, Sailing to Byzantium, Leda and the Swan, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. power and beauty of such poems seem intimately connected with the fact of their dramatic integrity and autonomy, and we have all been taught, in analyzing them, to refer to a speaker existing independent of the poet and to avoid the intentional and biographical fallacies which spuriously link the poem to the poet and the world outside the poem. Such an approach tends to undercut any notion that a poem has a single definite meaning, the meaning the poet gave it, and to support the idea that the meaning of a poem is indeterminate and/or multiple. All this is quite in accord with the orthodox critical doctrine that poetic language is differentiated from scientific language and preserved from competition with it by the fact that it is (a) nonreferential, making no claim upon the real world; and (b) complex, indefinite, and alogical, where scientific language is simple, definite, and logical. This roughly is the theory we have been taught to honor. In practice, however, critics commonly make use of the idea that these poems have a quite definite relationship to the poet and the real world. Thus it is common to call the speakers of many of these poems by the name of the poet and to characterize the speakers of poems by saying that they are someone other than the poet. contradiction between such