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Abstract
The dissertation examines the permutations of the dramatic monologue genre in twentieth-century poetry. My objective is to discover how the genre evolves and supersedes previous examples of the convention, and how such developments are contiguous with a different, more complex grounding of the poetic I. My operative definition of dramatic monologue derives from Kate Hamburger's concept of feigning (The Logic of Literature, 1974). Feigning underlies the genre's duality, its conflation of the fictive (dramatic) and the lyric in first person form. Thus the I of dramatic monologue, Hamburger demonstrates, occupies a position on a scale of gradations between a more or less intense feignedness. However, modern dramatic monologues so exploit the feint's indeterminacy that they transport the genre beyond this scalar model. In addition to using pervasive multivocality, the monologues exaggerate the form's generic duality and expand it into a multimodality. Finally, the modernist feint (and its position relative to the poet) is typically made complicated by its status as either a typological figure or a vocational double of the poet. Thus, as a strategic response to the Romantic I, the modern dramatic monologue attempts to develop an I which is elusive and variable enough to reflect the heterogeneity of human nature and self-consciousness without inhibiting commitment or demanding an impersonality equated with self-cancellation.
The poetry of T. S. Eliot and David Jones makes persistent use of the feint. Their dramatic monologues frequently depend upon typological characters and combinations of multiple voices and modalities, but these poets also deploy significant adaptations of the choral, oratorical, and congregational first person plural in order to approach a more complex poetic I. The feints developed in the poems of Eliot and Jones establish a dialectics of reciprocity which eventually transforms the poetry into an intersubjective process. As a result, by means of a peculiarly dynamic feint, both poets achieve a meditative verse which successfully fuses personal singing with universal signing.
