The technique of dramatic monologue which affords writers an objective and ironic distance from the speaker was a useful method to Robert Browning and T. S. Eliot who tried to overcome the problem of excessive pursuit of subjective vision of the Romantic poets, their immediate predecessors. In “The Metaphysical Poets,” Eliot denies any direct influence from and continuity with the Romantic and Victorian poets and finds his inspiration in the works of Metaphysical poets and French Symbolist poets. In a review on John Middleton Murry's Cinnamon and Angelica, however, he recommends Browning to the modern poets, including himself, as a pattern to follow. Eliot's contradictory attitude toward Browning stems, I think, from the fact that his ambition to become a modern poet of the Twentieth Century sometimes overshadowed his acknowledgement of Browning as one of his masters. But it is hardly possible to deny that he knew Browning very well and his early works show a close affinity to the works of Browning, more than those of any other poet. “My Last Duchess,” Browning's masterpiece of dramatic monologue, and Eliot's “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” share many characteristics; both are written in dramatic monologue, and both are studies of the latent violence and danger of solipsistic self-love. Both Browning's Duke and Eliot's Prufrock are paranoiacs who are imprisoned within their sick self-consciousness. They suffer from their impossible desire for woman, and they reveal their hidden violent nature when their desire for woman is thwarted. As the Duke shows his sadistic character when he transforms his Duchess who was beyond his control into an artifact, the same violence of Prufrock turns against himself and becomes a masochistic one. In this sense Prufrock can be regarded as a modern Duke of Browning, who wallows in the mire of “etherized” self-consciousness. The paranoiac self-consciousness proves itself a hell both to the Duke and Prufrock. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is a good example in which Eliot faithfully followed his own advice to the modern poets, that is “to distill the dramatic essences [of Browning], if we can, and infuse them into some other liquor.”

• 김원중(성균관대학교) | Won-Chung Kim