The Politics of Dramatic Form

The Politics of Dramatic Form written by Isobel Armstrong in the back of Robert Browning’s Poetry was a little hard for me to read. The language was easy to follow, but overall I felt like I was just reading something that was just being stated. I guess it just seemed unorganized. It was hard to relate to because Isobel wasn’t always talking about Browning’s poetry, but instead kept talking about Mill, Fox, and Horne who are artists I don’t know of. I felt like Armstrong mentioned very good points, but it was just overall hard to compare each artist to Browning.

Summary:

Like I stated above The Politics of Dramatic Form was hard for me to follow, so I’m going to try my best to relay the information that I just read in my own words. The two poems that are being critiqued are ‘Porphyria’ and ‘Jojannes Agricola’. Within these poems, Armstrong says “the two kinds of poetry, make a fundamental distinction between two kinds of knowledge” (557). One of the types is granted by expressive feeling and psychological feeling while the other type is the knowledge granted by the scientist. Mills and Fox shared the same thought; believed that the poet educates feelings, but Mill also believed that “poetry educates by belongings to the domain of private feeling and not by negotiating the public world of power” (558).  A little farther down, it also says something that I think is very important to understand. It says, “the true poet is unself-concious and alone with his affective, emotional condition which never goes beyond itself” (558). If the poem is going to have passion, emotion, tension, or whatever it may be, then you can’t focus to hard or your just not going to get there. This brings up my next point. A little later in the essay, Armstrong talks about how both of the poems (Porphyria and Jojannes Agricola) have a lot of silencing of the voice. We see in Robert’s poetry how he uses the silence of the speakers as a way for the characters to be seen/heard. An example would be “Porphyria called me, but no voice replied (15); and then the poem just ends. Here is more an example of the characters speech that is redundant. And then the last thing I wanted to focus on was how Armstrong said that Fox and Horne were seen as new kind of Victorian poetry. He says that Fox “believed ideological necessity of drama and programme for drama as externalized conflict objectified as the materials for democratic participation” (575). And then that Horne believed in the central structure importance of dialogue.

Analysis:

Overall, I think that Armstrong had some very good facts about the politics of dramatic form, but I felt like as I was reading everything was just being stated to me. I felt like I was rushed reading it, and I don’t think I liked this “entry” as I have liked the other ones. It was also so long that by the time I got to the end of it I was ready to be done and I also felt like I had to go back and re-read some parts that I didn’t quite understand the first time around. I still thought it was interesting and it still talked about Robert’s poetry a little, so that’s good!