What is Dramatic Monologue

Dramatic Monologue:

Dramatic monologue is a kind of poem in which a single character reveals a dramatic situation. He is overheard speaking to a silent listener. Robert Browning perfected this form of poetry. 

 

Characteristics of Dramatic Monologue:

 In its complete form it has the following characteristics:

• A single person, who is not the poet himself, utters the entire poem in a specific situation at a critical moment.

• This person addresses and interacts with one or more other people. But we know of the auditor's presence and what they say and do only from clues in the discourse of the single speaker.

• The monologue is organised in such a way that its focus is on the temperament and character that the dramatic speaker unintentionally reveals in the course of what he says.

A dramatic monologue differs from a dramatic lyric; in the dramatic lyric the second of the three attributes mentioned above is absent. That is, in the dramatic lyric the speaker does not reveal his character inadvertently in the course of arguing. For example, Donne's "The Canonization" and "The Flea" are dramatic lyrics, not dramatic monologues, because there, the focus of interest is on the speaker's ingenious argument, on the revelation of his character.

Browning poems like "My Last Duchess", "Andrea del Sarto", and many others are good examples of dramatic monologue. Tennyson's "Ulysses", and Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" are also good examples. Poets like Frost, Robinson, Pound, Lowell also wrote some good dramatic monologues.