Modernist dramatic monologues drew from Browning and Tennyson the accents of self-involved, quasi-hysterical poetry dramatised as a symptom of decadent or philistine culture. Browning's Caliban, Andrea del Sarto, Sordello and Fra Lippo Lippi (once we translate them back into contemporary concerns) represent versions of the post-Romantic poet locked into conventions that have lost purchase, sensing new power relations in a secular age, yet subject to the superstitions written into the vocal resources at their command. Tennyson's Ulysses, Oenone, Tithonus and the Maud persona speak to other forms of post-Romantic aesthetic anguish, a beleaguered sense of the poet as feminised, marginalised, so belated as to inhabit zones of being quite other to culture, powerless unless creatively on the move beyond this world. Pound and Eliot adopted the Victorian dramatic monologue as most radically challenging Victorian cultural norms, enabling a spirited post-Victorian aesthetic seeking both to satirise the anaemic, servile and redundant subject positions available to the artist as with ‘Prufrock’ or ‘Mauberley’, or to ground more virile Nietzschean personae as with Pound's vocalising of tough intellectual and hedonist troubadours, or Eliot's exploration of the prophetic voice in The Waste Land. The choice between satirical weakling or art superman seems dependent on relations with an idea of apocalyptic or merely brutal politics. With the political turn of the 1930s, as national cultures in Europe fell under the spell of Soviet communism and Italian and German fascism, modernist poets again sought out the resources of the dramatic monologue with a more considered and Browningesque exploration of the relationship of art to power (implicit in Tennyson too, if only in Oenone's intuition of Cassandra's sensing of warrior violence at the heart of cultural fears: ‘A sound / Rings ever in her ears of armed men’). Pound took his personae and wove them into increasingly belligerent and bellicose performances in the Cantos, sensing the need to make alliances with a triumphalist fascism through impersonation by fragmentary quotation from comparably cruel and aesthetically virile cultures from the past: Confucian China, Guido's Italy. Eliot more cautiously gauged the measure of the new militarism with his broken monologues, ‘Coriolan’, ‘Triumphal March’, ‘Difficulties of a Statesman’ and ‘Fragment of an Agon’.