English 1022E Lecture Notes - Lecture 33: Dramatic Monologue, My Last Duchess
Document Summary
Stepping outside the limitations of their own mind. To be ethical you must be able to exercise your imagination. Imagine what its like to be another person. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively. He must put himself in the place of another and many others. The pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. In the dramatic monologue they extend past their own limitations. The mind that he projects himself into appears to be a murderer. The possibility for an artist to create something that has nothing to do with them. Elliot: to write a poem is to kill a part of yourself. Because they don"t want to be linked to it as its creator. What they are saying in a poem scares them; he is frightened by the implications of his own thinking. Browning deeply influenced by poets who wrote before him.