The dramatic monologueself-definition: "I am myself, as each man is himself" (21). It appears,
however, that it is precisely his keen self-awareness that is now to culminate
in his self-annihilation.
This dramatic monologue has an Epilogue, in a sense a companion or
pendant monologue, spoken by the Minor Poet's friend Tom Leigh. Leigh
describes to an unnamed auditor his having "burst in" to the poet's room,
"And found him as you know" (172-73). Leigh enumerates reasons that
others have suggested for the poet's suicide - his unrequited love for a
woman, his poverty, his despair over "carping critics" (202) - but he
himself reserves judgment: "I, Tom Leigh, his friend / I have no word at all
to say of this" (202-03). And yet it seems to me that Leigh has already
supplied the chief reason when he observes, "There was no written word to
say farewell, / Or make clear the deed" (176-77). This inexpressiveness is
precisely what the Minor Poet struggles with in the course of his mono-
logue. As he prepares to swallow his phial of poison, he looks to his books,
telling them, "you've stood my friends /... yet now I'll turn / My back on
you, even as the world / Turns it on me" (78-81). He seems to turn from
their serried ranks because the public reception of his works has painfully
disappointed him. But his next comment indicates that he is still more
hounded by the frustrations inherent in his own conditions of production.
He compares himself to another poet who experiences "no silent writhing
in the dark, / No muttering of mute lips, no straining out / Of a weak
throat a-choke with pent-up sound, / A-throb with pent-up passion"
(95-98). His description of what this other poet did not suffer depicts in
vivid detail his own writhing, straining, choking, and throbbing attempts at
speech. Even in this moment of a distress so radical as to require suicide, he
feels himself unable to articulate his emotions; he says of this other poet:
"At least, he has a voice to cry out his pain" (94).
While the Minor Poet stresses how "silent" and "mute" he has been, he
nevertheless figures his own failed eloquence in musical terms. He claims
early in the monologue that "From very birth" he has been out of place, "A
blot, a blur" (50). But in continuing this self-canceling line of description,
he calls himself something that at least points to a potential lyricism: "a
note / All out of tune in this world's instrument" (50-51). Later he
complains, "My life was jarring discord from the first," but concedes,
"Tho' here and there brief hints of melody, / Of melody unutterable, clove
the air" (165-67). Yet even this attempt to salvage some attainment points
to the inescapability of his failure. With the oxymoronic "melody unutter-
able," he conveys that even this hint of music was fleeting and inchoate.
While Tom Leigh finds "no written word" to "make clear the deed"
(179-80), he does find scrawled marginalia in the poet's books, as well as
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