At a time when ancient truths were crumbling and certainties were hard to find, poets created speakers, often persons of divided mind or conflicting sympathies, who addressed unheard auditors with their words. In talking about themselves to this imagined audience, the speakers of these dramatic monologues revealed themselves to the real audience, the poets' readers. Through the use of such ventriloquized verse, ideas could be brought forward and debated without danger. The poet, speaking the monologues through the mouths of his characters, was a hidden God, a reflection of the subversive ideals of Victorian agnostic theology.

Although focusing on the period of roughly 1830 to 1880 and on such principal creators of dramatic monologues as Robert Browning, Tennyson, and William Morris, David Shaw also examines monologues from Chaucer and Donne to T.S. Eliot, Randall Jarrell, and Robert Lowell. Using the agnostic theories of God's masks as a model for the masks assumed by poets when they write dramatic monologues, Shaw shows how important changes in cultural and intellectual history can disturb and transform a major poetic genre.

W. David Shaw is a professor emeritus in the Department of English at Victoria College, University of Toronto.

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