Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Dramatic Monologues

I've just logged on to a new Poetry School online course led by Liane Strauss called 'Christ, it was better than hunting bear'. The title of the course is taken from a poem I hadn't come across before: Night, Death, Mississippi by Robert Hayden - it is such a stark and powerful example of a dramatic monologue. There is no emotive language in this poem, the detail and the facts of the poem do more work than a poet telling us what to feel/think ever could.

On the strength of the inspiration for the course title alone I'm really looking forward to what I'll learn about dramatic monologue over the next ten weeks.  The first assignment is to take a look at Robert Browning's My Last Duchess (no surprises there) and write a dramatic monologue after some close reading and a lot of thinking no doubt...

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