The benefit of reading marginal forms
Dramatic monologue and ekphrastic poetry
The dramatic monologue and ekphrastic poetry are minor forms
with which many nineteenth-century authors, including realist novelists such as
Thomas Hardy and Henry James, experimented. Both types of poems blend genres and
modes in ways that these and other authors found appealing. James’s 1868 “The Story of a Masterpiece,” for instance,
reworks Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue “My Last Duchess” by featuring a
painter-narrator more concerned with his “own private impression” than the “actually
existing.” This emphasis on subjectivity can make the poem seem antirealist. Unlike
the panoramic views and detailed settings of the realist novel, the dramatic
monologue and ekphrastic poetry seem to sacrifice the realist demand for
heterogeneity and social amplitude for a dramatic omission of things (artworks) and
persons, offering only partial portraits and dramatizing absence. Yet, there are
important resonances with realism: an emphasis on the historical, wherein realism
involves a mind working in relation to other minds, and mental renderings of time
and space; the domestication of setting and subject, and an egalitarianism toward
and mixing of genres (as exemplified in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “English idylls”); the importance
of rhetorical purpose and the communalization of meaning; an ironic awareness of
non-universality and the multiplicity of perspectives; and an emphasis on sensory
perception and embodiment as a privileged source of meaning.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction: Poetic innovation and the shift toward realism
- 2.The dramatic monologue and the techniques of sentimental realism – beyond
accuracy
- 3.Robert Browning, Augusta Webster, and the materialization of the poetic
scene
- 4.Ekphrastic poetry and a realism of the senses
- 5.Michael Field – historicizing feeling
- 6.Conclusion
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Works cited