Ulysses
“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” gets quoted as pure uplift. The poem around it is the speech of an old king walking out on his kingdom, his wife, and his son — and Tennyson never tells you whether to cheer.
Theme
dramatic-monologue
2 poems
dramatic-monologue
Robert Browning
The Victorian master of the dramatic monologue: in “My Last Duchess,” “Porphyria’s Lover,” and The Ring and the Book, Browning let dukes, murderers, and saints expose their own minds — and pointed the way to modern poetry.