The Man He Killed

“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.