earticle

영어

Dramatic monologues appear in T. S. Eliot’s major poems. Eliot’s use of the dramatic monologues that are not always perfect in the Victorian poetic terms reflects his poetic or aesthetic ideals that poetry should represent a unified or immediate experience, that is, a unification of thought and feeling. Especially Eliot’s preference for the unconventional dramatic monologue forms, which contributes to the characterization of his poetic style as a modernist poetics, results in our critical debates about them. For example the critical difference in our approach to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” between as a dramatic monologue and as an interior monologue derives from Eliot’s strategically ambiguous treatment of the forms. The ultimate poetic aim of Eliot’s ambiguous use of the dramatic forms lies in the ‘problematization’ of poetic subjects or lyrical selves to attack on the conventional concept of autonomous subjects. The ambiguous voices of unidentifiable poetic subjects or speakers in Eliot’s major poems reveal his modernist view of human subject, anticipating the postmodernist one. Paradoxically, the ambiguous voices of unidentifiable subjects that often appear in divided consciousness help to represent a unified experience in the poems. In short, Eliot’s use of the unconventional dramatic monologues suggests his modernist poetics which focuses on the idea of the aimlessly drifting human subjects who, nevertheless, do not give up seeking for the absolute truth or authority to refer to.