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Speaker in a Poem Poems are personal. The thoughts and
feelings they express belong to a specific person, and however general or
universal their sentiments seem to be, poems come to us as the expression of an
individual human voice. That voice is often a voice of the poet, but not
always. Poets sometimes create characters just as writers of fiction or drama
do. And the speaker of a poem may express ideas or feelings very different from
the poet’s own.
Usually there is much more to a poem than
the characterization of the speaker, but often it is necessary first to
identify the speaker and determine his or her character before we can
appreciate what else goes on in the poem. And sometimes, in looking for the
speaker of the poem we discover the gist of the entire poem. The Lyric and its Speaker
With narrative poems and dramatic
monologues, we are usually in no danger of mistaking the speaker for the poet.
Lyrics may present more of a challenge. When there is a pointed discrepancy
between the speaker of a lyric and what we know of the poet— when the speaker
is a woman, for example, and the poet is a man— we know we have a fictional
speaker to contend with and that the point (or at least one point) of the poem
is to observe the characterization carefully.
 
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