[Maryann Corbett]

Roger, I can't speak for everybody else who's replying (and thank you, Chris and Gail and Susan and Lance), but I'm reserving the term "dramatic monologue" for a pretty specific situation. A dramatic monologue is a persona poem--a character who's not the poet is being created or borrowed--and in general it's also that character's half of a two-person exchange.

In some cases the speaker is speaking to himself (and us) only, and those are soliloquies, strictly speaking, rather than monologues. But maybe that's a needlessly picky distinction.

[Susan McLean]

Roger, I would venture that a lyrical or descriptive poem in the first person is not really a dramatic monologue, whether the speaker is the poet or a persona. On the other hand, I think that if the dramatic and narrative elements are there, a poem can be labeled a dramatic monologue, whether the speaker is the poet or a persona.

Susan

[Michael Cantor]

My understanding is that one of key points of a dramatic monologue (My Last Duchess is a classic example) is that the poem operates on multiple levels, that speaker unknowingly reveals more of himself/herself or the story than intended.

[Roger Slater]

So the poet is winking at the reader about the character who is speaking in the poem? Which means that if even a careful reader conflates the speaker with the poet, the poem is a failure (at least to the extent it wants to be a dramatic monologue), because a "character" is created and not just a "persona," which can exist even if perfectly disguised as the poet.

Every now and then someone here posts a poem in which the speaker tells of a terrible personal tragedy, like the death of a child or a fatal diagnosis, and generally the poet discloses "don't worry, I made it up," so people can react without inhibition. I suppose such a disclosure wouldn't be necessary for a "dramatic monologue," because everyone is supposed to be able to figure out that there is an invented character speaking.

[Maryann Corbett]

...everyone is supposed to be able to figure out that there is an invented character speaking.

That's certainly one of the challenges I'm fighting with. If the poet uses a known set of characters, identified in the title (as Susan does with "Emilia to Desdemona"), the problem's licked. Known characters can also be introduced in epigraphs or in early text. Making it obvious that the setting is historical (Browning's usual method) is another sort of useful hint. Having the speaker be, say, female if the poet's male also helps.

But if the setting is contemporary, and the speaker is nobody in particular, and the same sex as the poet, then almost the only available hint that the speaker is not the poet is the situation of dialogue--something to indicate the presence of a second speaker whom we don't hear. Or at least that's the way it feels as I work! And that's why I'm hunting for additional ideas. I could just spell it all out in the title, but I'd like not to have to.

(I've certainly created made-up characters and un-self-aware speakers before--but, well, all of them were remarkably similar to myself.)

[Chris Childers]

I wouldn't say Michael's point is one of definition so much as valuation. That is, the genre isn't defined by multiple levels and the authorial wink, though such are often present in excellent examples. I think Maryann is right that technically there needs to be an addressee and a dramatic situation--witness "My Last Duchess." I tend to extend the term to a poem with narrative elements in which the speaker is clearly a character; e.g., "Porphyria's Lover" doesn't really have an addressee, unless it's Porphyria's dead body, but I would still teach it as a dramatic monologue. I would say the dramatic monologue consists of the speech of a single character from within a story, usually to another character, which serves both to tell the story and illuminate the character.

[Gail White]

I would say that the essence of a dramatic monologue is that the narrator must have a dramatic story to tell. This eliminates the personal experience of most of us, as well as all first-person accounts of generalized experiences, such as falling in love, being disappointed in love, and wandering lonely as a cloud.

Also, I think it's ALWAYS a mistake, unless you are dealing with a known "confessional" poet, to assume that a first-person poem is an account of first-person experience. I once wrote a poem in which the speaker laments her infertility. Unfortunately, several friends thought I was venting my soul on a personal tragedy,and I was obliged to explain that I was childless by choice.

[Maryann Corbett]

I think it's ALWAYS a mistake, unless you are dealing with a known "confessional" poet, to assume that a first-person poem is an account of first-person experience.

Gail, I don't disagree, but I notice that people have great difficulty avoiding this mistake. We see it all the time on poetry boards. (Part of our excuse in that situation is that we all probably know too much about each other and have experience with each other's body of work.) Because it's a likely mistake, it seems like a good idea to help readers avoid it if we can.

In looking again at Donaghy's "Black Ice and Rain," (thanks for that suggestion, Chris) I find I have trouble being absolutely certain that the speaker depicted there is a creation. Part of my trouble is that the early part of the poem, before the story proper begins, is in language that strikes me as too poetic for conversation over hors d'oeuvres, which is what it's supposed to be. It's much more like thought than talk. It's far more interesting as a poem that way, but to my mind it leaves the situation less clear.

I can accept that, maybe, there is no one couple like the couple in the poem, no couple who were friends of the real Donaghy and who had all that kitschy art on their walls. But any first-person narrator's thoughts exist only because the poet has thought them first, so I'm quite sure there's a lot of genuine Donaghy and of his experiences in the poem.

Editing back to add: By now, others have probably found this page at poets.org with an additional list of examples, some new to me.

Finally resorting to the textbooks on my shelves (duh), I find that the Kennedy/Gioia "Introduction to Poetry" has this definition: "A poem written as a speech made by a character at some decisive moment. The speaker is usually addressing a silent listener as in T.S. Eliot's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' or Robert Browning's 'My Last Duchess.' "

[John Whitworth]

A number of people have written to me about my poem 'Little' whose subject is the death of a disabled child. I feel a bit of a fraud when I cannot, as it were, produce the child out of my own life. I feel as if I have pulled wool over the eyes of a number of good and worthy people. The child, Archie, is a conflation of three children my daughters knew at a care home where they worked. Only one of them died. Or has died up to now.

I hope, when my poem 'Tobacco and Boies' appears in Quadrant... Dammit, I haven't smoked for years. Oh well!

[Maryann Corbett]

John, your example demonstrates how intractable a problem this is. If I remember rightly, there's only one first-person pronoun in your "Little Prince" and it's "our," so it's not as if there's a clear, individual first-person narrator. Poetry is fiction, but we're moving people to feel real feelings, and the brain just doesn't make the separation well.