Modeling the Romantic Poet

Chapter 3 discussed how place informs constructions of the poet. This chapter explores a form more usually associated with the post-Romantic period, the dramatic monologue, to suggest that the egoistic personae developed by Wordsworth and Smith in effect deconstruct a particular kind of poet. Read by many as establishing the use-value of the autobiographical within Romanticism, much of Wordsworth’s poetry is discussed as arising from a particular function of self-reliance; in the same way, Smith has emerged as a prime user of biographical details to underpin her expressions of unhappiness. I want to trouble this conclusion, and will do so first by projecting the dramatic monologue back to, initially, the 1790s as dramatized monologues, a fine distinction that is meant to acknowledge how Smith and Wordsworth write performances of selfhood. They model several versions of Poet through an emphasis on revealing, discretely, how speakers perform questionable identities, in the process undoing their own poetry; Smith and Wordsworth concentrate on establishing the parameters of the Poet, filtered through an exploration of the artfully constructed Self. In some of the most composed of the Elegiac Sonnets, in “Beachy Head,” in Lyrical Ballads, and in The Prelude, the “theatrical,” to use Judith Pascoe’s term, underpins and indeed creates the personalized narrators of the poems.1