Ironic Self-Exposure: War Generals and Soldiers in Monologic Form

This paper examines the conceptual and formal affinities between Robert Browning's dramatic monologues and war poetry, positing the former as a Victorian precursor to the latter's modernist explorations of trauma and moral ambiguity. Defining Dramatic Monologue, a form where a single speaker addresses a silent auditor, revealing psychological depths through indirect means and dramatic irony. Poems like "My Last Duchess" (1842) and "Porphyria's Lover"(1836) expose speakers' obsessions, guilt, and rationalizations, blurring the lines between confession and self-deception. This structure privileges subjective voice over objective narrative, inviting readers to judge the speaker's unreliability. The endeavor here is to discern the themes and relate the repercussions of War to dramatic monologue. The poems discussed are Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" (1920) which mirrors Browning's technique by having a speaker confront an implied patriotic listener, unveiling trauma through visceral imagery and irony. Sassoon's “Repression of War Experience” (1917) similarly rationalises violence, echoing Browning's portrayals of moral hypocrisy in "The Bishop Orders His Tomb” (1845). Thematic Intersections between the genres probe isolation, justification of atrocity, and the limits of language under duress, with Browning's Victorian criminals prefiguring war poets' shell-shocked victims. Moreover, this paper tries to analyze the intersection between dramatic monologue and the sufferings of war veterans. Through a close reading of the poems as primary sources and the use of available critical works as secondary sources, an attempt is made to conduct a critical evaluation of war poems in order to point out the main ideas and experiences reflected in his poems.