The dramatic monologue, a genre developed in the nineteenth century by the English poets Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson, is present in the antipoetry of Nicanor Parra highlighting its major contributions: the opening of poetry to everyday, spoken language and to the present moment; a clear and straightforward syntax and lexicon; the replacement of the lyric Romantic subject with a character who gradually distances himself from the empirical I of the poet; the inclusion of a variety of linguistic discourses and the ever-increasing dramatic nature of the poetic enunciations. The dramatic monologue in Parra's antipoetry begins with poems that act as masks and self portraits in which the speaker can easily be confused with and even identified as the poet himself. Gradually other voices are introduced, the aggressive beggar in "Song to Pass the Hat", Lazarus, and especially the Christ of Elqui, who is a contradictory character independent of the author as well as a mechanism for eluding the censors during the Pinochet dictatorship. The After Dinner Speeches are yet another form of dramatic monologue since they use the genre's essential strategies: a speaker not necessarily identifiable with the author/actor who addresses an audience that never speaks but is implicitly included in the speech.