The Dramatic Monologue in Swinburne, Browning, and Tennyson

Anthony H. Harrison, Professor of English, North Carolina State University

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Note 17, chapter 3, in the author's Swinburne's Medievalism: A Study in Victorian Love Poetry which Louisiana State University Press published in 1979. It has been included in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.

Browning for instance, insists in The Book and The Ring that his art is designed to "tell a truth obliquely," but the moral, intellectual, or spiritual truths his monologues communicate do not usually involve the issue of poetry's relationship to history and our understanding of the ways in which that relationship operates, as Swinburne's do. The same point might be made about Tennyson's monologues.

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Last modified June 2000

Last modified 8 June 2007