"The Politics of Dramatic Form", Isobel Amstrong

Summary

Armstrong's essay deals with Robert Browning's dramatic poetry and also presents several politics of dramatic forms from Browning's contemporaries. Indeed, Armstrong presents Mill's and Fox's points of view concerning dramatic form. She explains Mill's distinctions between two kinds of knowledge (poetic and scientific) and between two kinds of poets (the poet of nature and the poet of culture). Then, she presents Mill's objections concerning Browning's poetry by using two poems as examples throughout her essay : "Porphyria's Lover" and "Johannes Agricola in Meditation" (first called "Porphyria" and "Johannes Agricola"). She uses these two examples because they both deal with solipsism. Armstrong thinks that Fox's poetics are not based what she called "psychological identification" but they are more based on emotion. Then Fox's and Schlegel's visions of a dramatic poem are explained. Armstrong also explains the dramatic poet's role and Mill's and Fox's opinions about it. Eventually, she presents Browning's objective vision of dramatic poetry and his use of fiction in his own poetry.

Analysis

In Isobel Armstrong's essay, two critical visions of Robert Browning's dramatic poetry are presented. Mill believes that a poet should not take part in political or social subject because a poet has not a scientific knowledge. Fox disagrees with that statement, as we can read in the essay: "Like Fox, he believed that the poet educates feelings, but unlike Fox he believed that poetry educates by belonging to the domain of private feeling and not by negotiating the public world of power"; "where Mill made a distinction between poetry and science or knowledge, Fox puts the two together". To Fox, Robert Browning is a political poet not only because he writes about political issues of his time but also because he is critical toward "the structure of the monologue itself".

To Fox, a poem is dramatic if there is contrasting feelings in it but it does not necessary need a dialogue and a personae as in Browning's dramatic monologues. To Schlegel, drama in a poem needs dialogues between two different parties because it can bring change in the reader's mind. Robert Browning's poems often include dialogues but the sometimes the listener remains silent. To Fox, a dramatic poet is able to analyze any "modern psychological condition".

To Browning, dramatic poetry is objective and so is the dramatic poet: "Browning writes that objective poetry 'is what we call dramatic poetry', when 'even description, as suggesting a describer with'. Thus, the reader is forced to hear, not overhear, a substantive and public poetry. The man passes, the work remains". The two poems presented in this essay ("Porphyria" and "Johannes Agricola") are seen as objective poems. Armstrong also explains that Browning's uses fiction in his poetry because it allows poetic language and it avoids solipsism.