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“My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning (1842)
An iconic example of dramatic monologue, this poem, one of Hardy’s favorites, allows a Duke to speak in praise of on oil portrait of his deceased wife. The more he talks, however, he reveals that he is a ruthless and mercenary hypocrite who abused his wife and was perhaps responsible for her death.
“Strange Meeting” by Wilfred Owen (1918)
“I am the man you killed”—in Owen’s dark perception of the fate of a World War I soldier haunted after death by the ghost of one of the many men he killed in pointless battles, the poet, influenced by the uproar that greeted Hardy’s antiwar poem, reveals the horrors of war. The soldiers from different sides share the same damnation.
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot (1915)
A far more intricate experiment in dramatic monologue that represents how the next-generation Modernists expanded on Hardy’s generation’s embrace of new forms. This poem, in which a would-be poet on his way to an afternoon tea comes to reveal his own timid and bookish nature, shows how, without authorial intrusion, a character—here an erudite and pretentious grad student—can reveal his deepest yearnings and his most tragic flaws.
By Thomas Hardy
Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave
Thomas Hardy
At an Inn
Thomas Hardy
Channel Firing
Thomas Hardy
Far From The Madding Crowd
Thomas Hardy
Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy
Neutral Tones
Thomas Hardy
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy
The Convergence of the Twain: Lines on the loss of the "Titanic"
Thomas Hardy
The Darkling Thrush
Thomas Hardy
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Thomas Hardy
The Return of the Native
Thomas Hardy
The Withered Arm and Other Stories
Thomas Hardy
The Woodlanders
Thomas Hardy
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