Chapter 3, like Chapter 2, discusses poetry where conversation is both a represented and an experiential event – but as a represented event, one marked by swerves, interruptions, and misprisions such as those Blanchot believed essential to honor the otherness of others. Performing conversation in print, Swinburne and Browning drew on the long dramatic speeches, the formal stichomythic exchanges, and the dialogues between communal chorus and heroic characters that both admired in classical Greek tragedy. The chapter argues that the verse dramas and dramatic monologues of the later poets attempted a reparative political work under conditions of conversational asymmetry. For both Swinburne and Browning, as later for Levinas and Blanchot, the often missed exchanges of dramatic speech, especially in its tense relations with lyric or choral song, offered a site where readers not only study but also experience the difficulty of meaningful exchanges with the autonomous, enigmatic, but also authoritative otherness of the human and non-human world.

The essay argues that Bishop sees poems as a series of possibilities to be revisited gratefully, shrewdly, critically, neither agonistically as precursors to battle or displace, nor polemically in the spirit of a literary politics championing a school or movement. It canvasses her relation to a range of nineteenth-century poets, focusing first from the Romantic period on Blake, to whose visionary poetics she adds a skeptical element, and Wordsworth. The essay finds Wordsworthian elements in her use of the word “something,” her intuition that crucial moments combine negativity and revelation, and her central insistence on the provisionality of vision. It then suggests that Bishop was prompted creatively by two Victorian genres: first, the dramatic monologue, with speakers liberated from accuracy and articulate in their egotism; second, nonsense poetry, with its minor-key version of transcendent magic and its frequent link of the “awful but cheerful.” The other abiding Victorian influence was Hopkins, along with Wordsworth and Baudelaire an exemplar dynamically observing his own process of observation.