A dramatic monologue is a type of poetry written in the form of a speech of an individual character.

There will be a single person, who is patently not the poet, who utters the speech that makes up the whole of the poem.

This person addresses and interacts with one or more other people; but we know of the auditors' presence, and what they say and do, only from clues in the discourse of the single speaker.

Examples include
• Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Ulysses, published in 1842, has been called the first true dramatic monologue. After Ulysses, Tennyson's most famous efforts in this vein are Tithonus, The Lotos-Eaters, and St. Simon Stylites, all from the 1842 Poems; later monologues appear in other volumes, notably Idylls of the King.

• Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach and Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse are famous, semi-autobiographical monologues. The former, usually regarded as the supreme expression of the growing skepticism of the mid-Victorian period, was published along with the latter in 1867's New Poems.

• Robert Browning produced his most famous work in this form. While My Last Duchess is the most famous of his monologues, the form dominated his writing career. The Ring and the Book, Fra Lippo Lippi, Caliban upon Setebos, Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, and Porphyria's Lover, as well as the other poems in Men and Women, are just a handful of Browning's monologues.