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 poetĄ¯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.