A dramatic monologue is a long piece of writing or poetry that seeks to reveal the reader or character’s innermost thoughts and feelings. Dramatic monologues can be entire works on their own, such as Tennyson’s poem "Ulysses," or they can simply be passages within a longer work, such as the soliloquys in Shakespeare’s plays. The dramatic monologue as a form or literary device was popularized by English Romantic poets such as Percy B. Shelley and Robert Browning.
