This paper focuses on the similarities and differences between Robert Browning's dramatic monologue and W. B. Yeats's mask theory. Even though two poets were not contemporaries, it is very interesting that they show some similarities in poetic skills and subjects. Unlike Romantics revealing a poet's subjective feeling directly in their poems, Robert Browning created the dramatic monologue to develop the field of the objective expression. In his “dramatic monologue,” a character instead of the poet utters the speech that makes up the whole of the poem, in a specific situation at a critical moment. This person addresses and interacts with other people and we know of his presence, as well as what they say and do, only from the clues in the discourse of the single speaker. In his “My Last Duchess” the Duke is negotiating with an emissary for a second marriage, and the reader can know the speaker's cruel character and intentions. In his “Andrea Del Sarto,” though Andrea was one of the greatest painters in the Renaissance period, he was a failure as an artist because of his artistic passion and indomitable spirit. Excusing his artistic frustration, he once more tries to believe his wife's lies. When Yeats entered art school in Dublin in 1884, he was an enthusiastic reader of English poetry, especially Browning. Yeats was an admiring reader of Browning's poetry, and Browning was one of the nineteenth-century forefather poets of Yeats. He explored, as Browning did, the themes of creative men divided within themselves and struggling to unify their inspirations toward love and intellect, aesthetic contemplation and heroic action. In this process, Yeats developed the concept of masks from the other self in contrast to the natural self perceiving a man as the conflicting existence between subjectivity and objectivity. In his doctrine of mask, Yeats provided a formal aesthetic for the poet's need to speak dramatically through the masks of other personalities; Browning had long practised dramatic poetry in principle in which he donned the masks of personalities totally unlike his own. Browning tended to hide his interests behind the masks of his characters, whereas Yeats more openly voiced a variety of mystical and antithetical thoughts. Yeats happened to find an occasional, almost incidental similarity of language and a shared attitude toward the sources of poetic inspiration with Browning's. By 1929, when he was sixty-four years old, rewriting and revising his poetry with an eye to a collected edition, he announced that he would be turned from Browning. Yeats was an appreciative reader of the older poet, but the great achievement of Yeats's poetry transformed and transcended the influence of Browning.

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Portrait of a Lady,” two major works of T. S. Eliot’s early poems, have been regarded as a kind of ramatic monologues. Many critics indicated that Eliot’s use of dramatic monologue was different from Victorian poets’, so they called Eliot’s dramatic monologues “interior monologues” or “psychologues.” However, some critics like Won-Chung Kim insisted that Eliot’s and Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues shared some characteristics by comparing their masterpieces, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “My Last Duchess.” In this paper, my premise is that Eliot’s dramatic monologues are different from Victorian poets’ like Browning’s because I think that Eliot changed the technique of dramatic monologue to reflect the spirit of his age, that is, the beginning of the 20th century. In the early 20th century, many writers including Eliot thought that the self is illogical and split, and claimed that they should focus on the human consciousness and try to find the method to express it. In his early poems, Eliot expressed the speakers’ consciousness that was divided. Some critics has also indicated that the speakers of Eliot’ early poems have self-conscious character caused by the split self. To create this character of the speakers, I think, Eliot adapted the technique of dramatic monologue. While the traditional dramatic monologues focus on showing the speakers’ values, Eliot’s show the conflict of the speakers’ doubling self that produces the effect of irony. The speakers’ doubling self consists of the superficial and the fundamental self. One represents the self that tries to conform to the life style of the bourgeois world and is very concerned about people’s judgment. The other represents the self that longs for something higher, more emotional and spiritual. When this doubling self collides with each other and causes conflict, the speaker observes himself in a dramatic way, that is, as a object. Then, the speaker returns to his daily life again.