Page 57 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

British Poetry

Notes 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.
Definitions of the dramatic monologue, a form invented and practiced principally by Robert
Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Dante Rossetti, and other Victorians, have been much debated in the
last several decades. Everyone agrees that to be a dramatic monologue a poem must have a speaker
and an implied auditor and that the reader often perceives a gap between what that speaker says
and what he or she actually reveals. In one of the most influential, though hotly contested definitions,
Robert Langbaum saw the form as a continuation of an essentially Romantic “poetry of experience”
in which the reader experiences a tension between sympathy and judgment. One problem with this
approach, as Glenn Everett has argued, lies in the fact that contemporary readers of Browning’s
poems found them vastly different from Langbaum’s Wordsworthian model.
Many writers on the subject have disagreed, pointing out that readers do not seem ever to sympathize
with the speakers in some of Browning’s major poems, such as “Porphria’s Lover” or “My Last
Duchess.” Glenn Everett proposes that Browninesque dramatic monologue has three requirements:
1. The reader takes the part of the silent listener.
2. The speaker uses a case-making, argumentative tone.
3. We complete the dramatic scene from within, by means of inference and imagination.

5.7 Summary
• Negative capability describes the resistance to a set of institutional arrangements or a system
of knowledge about the world and human experience.
• The Renaissance was a cultural movement that profoundly affected European intellectual life
in the early modern period.
• Supernaturalism is the theological belief that a force or power other than man or nature is
ultimate.
• Imagination, also called the faculty of imagining, is the ability of forming mental images,
sensations and concepts.

5.8 Keywords

Consensus : General agreement.
Upheaval : Violent or sudden change or an upward displacement of part of the earth’s crust.
Spanned : The full extent of something from end to end.
Monologue : A long speech by one actor in a play.

5.9 Review Questions

1. Write a short note on negative capability.
2. Explain the term Renaissance of wonder.
3. What is supernaturalism?
4. Define the term Dramatic monologue and write the features of dramatic monologue which
applies in poetry, according to M.H. Abrams.

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