Stages of SelfThe dramatic monologue has attracted considerable critical attention in English but is rarely considered relevant to French poetry and has generally been ignored in studies of comparative literature. In Stages of Self, various poems by Jules Laforgue, Stephane Mallarm, and Paul Ambroise Valery are analyzed to show that they conform to the norms of the genre even though they bear little surface resemblance to the dramatic monologues by Browning, Pound,