The role of monologue and dialogue in the Odyssey in modern women's poetry

Abstract

By telling and retelling stories by narrator and characters, Homer's Odyssey seems to suggest reworking episodes and characters in new forms. Modern poets prefer a dramatic monologue to enter into dialogue with a sewn canonical text, often in an obscene or subversive manner. Dramatic monologues are crucial to the revisionist mythology of women writers, often introducing female characters who are secondary and mostly silent in classical texts in order to articulate some elements of the story that have not been previously told. Poets such as Linda Pastan, Carol Ann Duffy, Louise Gluck, and Judith Kazanchis use monologue and dialogue to create a reworking of the Odyssey that moves Odysseus to the fringes of history and questions the importance of his heroic adventures.