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Introduction to the Poem
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About the lecture
In this module, we take a brief look at Browning's life, before introducing the dramatic monologue form and the associated critical terms "persona" and "interlocutor". After this, we examine the form of the poem (rhyming couplets) as well as looking at the the true story of the Duke of Ferrara's alleged murder of his young wife that may have inspired this poem.
About the lecturer
Clive Wilmer is one of the English team at Sidney Sussex, Cambridge. He teaches the period 1830 to the present day and Practical Criticism. His special interests reside in the areas of Victorian and Modernist poetry, as well as in Victorian aesthetics and social criticism.
He is the author of seven books of poetry, the latest of which is his New and Collected Poems (Carcanet Press, 2012). The editor of Penguin selections of John Ruskin and William Morris, he has written and lectured extensively on Ruskin, Morris and Ezra Pound; he is also the current Master of Ruskin's charity, the Guild of St George. He has published a book of interviews with contemporary poets, Poets Talking (Carcanet, 1994), and Cambridge Observed (Colt Books, 1998), an anthology of writings about Cambridge over the centuries. In 2005 he was awarded the medal Pro Cultura Hungarica by the Hungarian Ministry of Culture in recognition of his many translations of Hungarian poetry. He is currently editing the posthumous Selected Poems of Thom Gunn for Faber and Faber.
My name's Clive Wilmer. I'm a poet and literary critic,
00:00:03and I teach at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.
00:00:07One of the main things that I teach there is practical criticism,
00:00:10and this is going to be an exercise in practical criticism.
00:00:15The only difference from what I normally do is that I haven't got you here
00:00:19to engage with me in discussion.
00:00:23And really, the point of practical criticism is to discuss, to read
00:00:26a poem or perhaps a piece of prose
00:00:31very closely
00:00:33and to talk about it in all its aspects.
00:00:34So because you're not actually here with me while I talk,
00:00:37I'm going to give you a piece of information or a few pieces of information
00:00:41at the outset,
00:00:46which I would have hoped would emerge from a discussion
00:00:47if
00:00:51we were having a Cambridge class.
00:00:51So just to start with, I'm going to talk about a Victorian poem by Robert Browning
00:00:55called My Last Duchess.
00:01:01Browning
00:01:03was a mid Victorian born in 18 12 died in 18 89
00:01:041 of the major poets of his period.
00:01:09He is particularly associated
00:01:13with a kind of poem which he could be said to have invented,
00:01:16and this is an example of that kind of poem.
00:01:20It's called The Dramatic monologue,
00:01:23and I'm going to begin by saying what that is.
00:01:26A dramatic monologue is a poem
00:01:29in which the
00:01:31poet
00:01:33has, as it were, given over the speech of the poem
00:01:34to a character who he's imagined or invented.
00:01:37So the poet steps off the stage and allows
00:01:42somebody else
00:01:45to speak for him
00:01:46and for that to work. It's very important
00:01:48that the speaker of the poem
00:01:51could not be confused with the poet himself. It's got to be somebody
00:01:53quite different
00:01:57from the poet himself.
00:01:58Browning invented a particularly significant factor,
00:02:00which I should be talking about quite a lot
00:02:05in the course of this recording.
00:02:08Uh, instead of just having somebody else speak the words of the poem.
00:02:10He also asks you, the listener or the reader
00:02:16to imagine that somebody is listening to the poem
00:02:21that or
00:02:24that the speaker of the poem has an audience, a person who is hearing him speak,
00:02:25and I'm going to call that person the listener.
00:02:31I'm going to call them
00:02:34the interlocutor. That's the usual critical word.
00:02:35So you have
00:02:39the persona who speaks the poem
00:02:40and the interlocutor who listens to it.
00:02:43And you, the reader. I have to imagine the interlocutor,
00:02:45and you are, of course, yourself. Also, in some sense,
00:02:50the interlocutor
00:02:53part of the rule, though, is that the interlocutor doesn't himself or herself
00:02:55speak.
00:03:00But we imagine
00:03:01what he or she might say,
00:03:02or might think, or might what expressions
00:03:04might appear on their faces.
00:03:08And we imagine that from what the persona says,
00:03:10we also have to imagine
00:03:16listening to somebody speak
00:03:18the other circumstances in which
00:03:19the talk is taking place, what room the people are in,
00:03:22what time of day it is
00:03:26that kind of thing,
00:03:28and that imposes a rather surprising and interesting discipline on the poem.
00:03:30It means that the time
00:03:34it takes you
00:03:37to read the poem
00:03:38is the same length of time
00:03:41as the time it takes the speaker
00:03:43to speak it.
00:03:45That might not seem very extraordinary to you at first hearing,
00:03:47but it is rather extraordinary, extraordinary
00:03:51because nearly all literature assumes what you might call fictional time.
00:03:53That's to say, when you read a work of literature,
00:03:59you enter into a different time frame from the one that you live in
00:04:01But in the dramatic monologue, those two time frames are identical,
00:04:05and so that it means that the reader
00:04:11is much more profoundly engaged in the process of making the poem
00:04:14than he or she might otherwise be.
00:04:19Now that may be difficult to understand at first,
00:04:22but I hope to talk about that a good deal more later.
00:04:25So when you
00:04:30first read the poem or hear me as I shall do in a minute, read it.
00:04:31You are like
00:04:36the listener in the poem The Interlocutor
00:04:38uh, the effect, I think on first hearing it
00:04:41is a little like overhearing somebody talking on the telephone
00:04:46without
00:04:50hearing what the person at the other end of the phone
00:04:51is saying.
00:04:54You are put in a position
00:04:56where you deduce a great deal.
00:04:58And one of Browning's tricks that he uses a great deal in the dramatic monologue
00:05:00is he begins the poem
00:05:05in what feels like the middle of a conversation.
00:05:07You're not
00:05:10told what's happening. Nothing is explained.
00:05:11It's like walking into a room,
00:05:14and somebody is already talking
00:05:16and you try to work out what they're talking about.
00:05:18There's something in the dramatic monologue that reminds me a little
00:05:22of a kind of literature,
00:05:26which was invented at about the same time 18 thirties forties.
00:05:27That sort of period, which is the detective story.
00:05:32The detective story
00:05:35is a story in which the reader
00:05:36is especially engaged
00:05:38by the presence of mystery.
00:05:41When you read a detective story,
00:05:43you try to work out who did the murder
00:05:46to see if you can get there before the detective does
00:05:48a couple of other things. I'll say about the poem before I actually read it to you.
00:05:53One is I want you to notice as we read
00:05:57the form in which the poem is written.
00:06:01Many of Browning's later lot monologues and this is quite an
00:06:04early one are in the form we call blank verse,
00:06:07which Shakespeare used
00:06:10for the speeches in his plays.
00:06:11But this poem is rhymed.
00:06:14It's in rhyming couplets,
00:06:16but at first hearing, you may not even notice the rhymes.
00:06:20The rhymes are extraordinarily subdued,
00:06:24and they structure the poem very powerfully and tightly.
00:06:27Browning uses a lot of what we call upon Jean Bramall. That's to say
00:06:32the sense of the poem
00:06:36running over the line ending
00:06:38and when there are a lot of angina. Um, are
00:06:41you don't notice the rhyme as much as you do
00:06:43if there's a point of punctuation
00:06:46directly after the rhyme.
00:06:48Finally, I want to say something about Browning's use of history.
00:06:53This is a poem set
00:06:58in the Italian Renaissance.
00:07:00That's to say, in the 16th century, he puts it in the town of Ferrara,
00:07:02and we know that Browning was probably thinking
00:07:07of a particular historical circumstance.
00:07:11Alfonso,
00:07:14Duke of Ferrara in the mid 16th century,
00:07:16married a 14 year old girl
00:07:20in the way that people did in those days in aristocratic circles.
00:07:22In 15 58 her name was Lucrezia de Medici,
00:07:26and she was the daughter
00:07:31of the Duke of Florence.
00:07:33Mysteriously,
00:07:36Lucrecia died
00:07:37something like two years after the marriage had taken place,
00:07:40and there was a kind of rumours about that. Perhaps
00:07:44the duke had done away with her.
00:07:48Browning was fascinated by circumstances of that sort.
00:07:52Alfonso of Ferrara
00:07:57was a great
00:07:59patron of the arts,
00:08:00a man of extraordinary taste who encouraged painters and sculptors and architects
00:08:02like a great many of the princes of the Italian Renaissance.
00:08:09All these people had extraordinarily good taste.
00:08:14They combined that taste
00:08:18with something equally extraordinary, a kind of savage ruthlessness
00:08:20in the way they ran their personal lives
00:08:25and competed with their rival lords.
00:08:28And Browning is interested, I think, in the relation
00:08:32of beauty to moral virtue.
00:08:35We would like to think,
00:08:40perhaps,
00:08:42that the beautiful is synonymous with the good.
00:08:43But very often we discover
00:08:47that those who understand beauty best are somehow indifferent to the good,
00:08:49and so beauty and good come into conflict.
00:08:55And that is one of the main
00:08:58intellectual conceptions
00:09:00behind
00:09:02this otherwise very human poem
00:09:03about a relationship.
00:09:06So Browning doesn't use history
00:09:09in order to think about the Italian Renaissance.
00:09:12He uses it in order to understand something
00:09:15about human relationships, human attitudes, human morality.
00:09:19
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Wilmer, C. (2018, August 15). Poetry - Introduction to the Poem [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/options/poetry-5b1c8b2f-41c6-415a-b42f-40dbb34f6c8f?auth=0&lesson=285&option=13383&type=lesson
MLA style
Wilmer, C. "Poetry – Introduction to the Poem." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 15 Aug 2018, https://massolit.io/options/poetry-5b1c8b2f-41c6-415a-b42f-40dbb34f6c8f?auth=0&lesson=285&option=13383&type=lesson