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Who is "I" in a poem?

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PoetGuy

Really Experienced
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Posts
178
Poet Guy participates in multiple poetry forums (fora?) and has repeatedly seen this kind of sequence of events: A poet posts a poem written in first person that, at least in its surface content, talks about something very personal--a lost or troubled love, a death in the family or of a close friend, a confession about problems with depression, alcohol, drugs, one's job, one's family, etc. For example, at a site Poet Guy frequents, a poem was recently posted by a member that could be abstracted to the following content:
I am depressed.
My life is a mess.
I have thought about suicide,
but somehow I pull myself together each day.
I hope to live through this.​
What Poet Guy finds surpassingly odd about poems of this nature is that the standard response forum members make to a poem like this is not to comment on the poem itself, but to offer solace to the author. Variations on "hang in there, Fred" or "we all love you, Sue" are by far the most common comment, as if the posted poem is not a literary creation so much as it is a cri de coeur of the author--more anguished Facebook post than artistic creation.

Poet Guy is very curious about this, as this seems to be peculiar to poems. In fiction, when one encounters a line like "Reader, I married him," one doesn't think (at least Poet Guy assumes readers don't think) that the line refers to an event in Charlotte Bronte's life. But when they read "Waiting to Die" by Anne Sexton, they seem to believe that they are reading the author's true and very personal feelings.

Sexton may be a bad example. Try this one:
O, curlew, cry no more in the air,
Or only to the waters in the West;
Because your crying brings to my mind
Passion-dimmed eyes and long heavy hair
That was shaken out over my breast:
There is enough evil in the crying of wind.​
This is a poem by William Butler Yeats, titled variously "Hanrahan Reproves the Curlew" or "He Reproves the Curlew." It is unclear to Poet Guy if either of these titles were ones Yeats himself wrote or approved. It was written during a period where he was enthralled by Maud Gonne, but almost certainly does not describe some earlier relationship with her.

So what does "I" mean to you in a poem? Do you, as reader, identify that with the author, or do you think of it as being more like a first-person narrative in fiction, where the "I" is a narrative consciousness, but no more authorial in nature than any other character? If you use "I" in a poem (or "me," "my," etc., are you speaking confessionally or speaking through a persona?
 
Well PG, that depends. If what I read feels more like a cri de coeur (as you said) from the author I assume that someone in an emotional state has spilled themself onto the page. All poetry is biographical, sort of, but that kind of writing is more like a diary entry (and usually not an interesting one). I have a hard time seeing it as poetry.

But some poems, like your examples, use "I" to weave a distinctive voice into a poem. When I read that kind of poem I'm immersed in the poem and not the person who wrote it. If such a poem is really good, really speaking to me, the "I" can even become me because I've been transported by the power of the words and can relate to it that much. Here is another, famous (and sorry, long) example:

Daddy
by Sylvia Plath

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time--
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You--

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two--
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

That's really personal immediate writing but it also has a universal reach and the "I" is a rhetorical device that echoes the theme as much as images or other poetic devices do.

When I write an "I" poem, one I think is good it's me (that "I"), but an exaggerated, idealized or otherwise fictionalized me, to help drive the poem.

Anyway that's what "I" think. Phew. :cool:
 
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Angeline said:
Well PG, that depends. If what I read feels more like a cri de coeur (as you said) from the author I assume that someone in an emotional state has spilled themself onto the page. All poetry is biographical, sort of, but that kind of writing is more like a diary entry (and usually not an interesting one). I have a hard time seeing it as poetry.

But some poems, like your examples, use "I" to weave a distinctive voice into a poem. When I read that kind of poem I'm immersed in the poem and not the person who wrote it. If such a poem is really good, really speaking to me, the "I" can even become me because I've been transported by the power of the words and can relate to it that much. Here is another, famous (and sorry, long) example:

Daddy
by Sylvia Plath

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time--
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You--

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two--
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

That's really personal immediate writing but it also has a universal reach and the "I" is a rhetorical device that echoes the theme as much as images or other poetic devices do.

When I write an "I" poem, one I think is good it's me (that "I"), but an exaggerated, idealized or otherwise fictionalized me, to help drive the poem.

Anyway that's what "I" think. Phew. :cool:
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Ah, Angeline, good student sitting in the first row, whom Poet Guy has spent the semester admiring her properly crossed legs and lightly dimpled knees. "Daddy." Perfect example. Is "I" here Sylvia Plath herself (who, as her biographers have noted had issues with both her father and husband) or is this more abstracted than that? Does it matter?

Poet Guy's point was more, though, about us casual poets. When he has written poems in first person, it seems to him as though people respond to the poem, especially if the subject is one that would evoke sympathy, as if Poet Guy were confessing issues to friends. He personally does not think of poems, nor writes them, in this manner, but he is curious whether others do.

And, if so, to the extent that they do. If you write a truly confessional poem, what do you want as response to it? Sympathy? Empathy? Identification?

Or is merely dumping the emotion enough, like a kind of therapy?
 
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PoetGuy said:
Poet Guy participates in multiple poetry forums (fora?) and has repeatedly seen this kind of sequence of events: A poet posts a poem written in first person that, at least in its surface content, talks about something very personal--a lost or troubled love, a death in the family or of a close friend, a confession about problems with depression, alcohol, drugs, one's job, one's family, etc. For example, at a site Poet Guy frequents, a poem was recently posted by a member that could be abstracted to the following content:
I am depressed.
My life is a mess.
I have thought about suicide,
but somehow I pull myself together each day.
I hope to live through this.​
What Poet Guy finds surpassingly odd about poems of this nature is that the standard response forum members make to a poem like this is not to comment on the poem itself, but to offer solace to the author. Variations on "hang in there, Fred" or "we all love you, Sue" are by far the most common comment, as if the posted poem is not a literary creation so much as it is a cri de coeur of the author--more anguished Facebook post than artistic creation.

Poet Guy is very curious about this, as this seems to be peculiar to poems. In fiction, when one encounters a line like "Reader, I married him," one doesn't think (at least Poet Guy assumes readers don't think) that the line refers to an event in Charlotte Bronte's life. But when they read "Waiting to Die" by Anne Sexton, they seem to believe that they are reading the author's true and very personal feelings.

Sexton may be a bad example. Try this one:
O, curlew, cry no more in the air,
Or only to the waters in the West;
Because your crying brings to my mind
Passion-dimmed eyes and long heavy hair
That was shaken out over my breast:
There is enough evil in the crying of wind.​
This is a poem by William Butler Yeats, titled variously "Hanrahan Reproves the Curlew" or "He Reproves the Curlew." It is unclear to Poet Guy if either of these titles were ones Yeats himself wrote or approved. It was written during a period where he was enthralled by Maud Gonne, but almost certainly does not describe some earlier relationship with her.

So what does "I" mean to you in a poem? Do you, as reader, identify that with the author, or do you think of it as being more like a first-person narrative in fiction, where the "I" is a narrative consciousness, but no more authorial in nature than any other character? If you use "I" in a poem (or "me," "my," etc., are you speaking confessionally or speaking through a persona?
Click to expand...

This is a very interesting question. I know with newb poets the 'I' is most often themselves. I my case, the 'I' is very occassionally me— Alba for Him was written for my husband. Most often it is not—Another Word For Miscarriage is first person but I am definitely not that person—I'd tell that guy to fuck of and stick his money where he obviously has his head. I tend to write this way due to the immediacy of the first person position. Tanka is very hard to write outside first person and the one or two i have seen done this way aren't very good. It is intended as a subjective form. Haiku conversely should not contain any sense of self if you can avoid it.
 
vrosej10 said:
This is a very interesting question. I know with newb poets the 'I' is most often themselves.
Click to expand...
Poet Guy suspects this is why some poets react so negatively to certain kinds of criticism of their poems, because they identify so strongly with the text they have written that any remark, however mild or technical, is perceived as being directed at them personally, i.e.to the poet, rather than at the text of their poem.
vrosej10 said:
In my case, the 'I' is very occassionally me— Alba for Him was written for my husband. Most often it is not—Another Word For Miscarriage is first person but I am definitely not that person—I'd tell that guy to fuck of and stick his money where he obviously has his head. I tend to write this way due to the immediacy of the first person position. Tanka is very hard to write outside first person and the one or two i have seen done this way aren't very good. It is intended as a subjective form. Haiku conversely should not contain any sense of self if you can avoid it.
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Poet Guy would think that tanka, like most Asian forms, would not be the kind of poem that would raise the question about whether the poet identified strongly with the "I" of the poem. But Poet Guy does not profess any knowledge of Asian forms, and anything he would say about them would be brainless chatter.

He will merely say that tanka was not what he was thinking of when he started this thread.
 
More interesting to me is who is the "You" in a poem.

The best poetry is that which makes everyone feel like the you, or the I or the we. In many poems defined as "confessional" yet well written, it is not as much of a pouring out but an inviting in.

Who is you? The you is me and so are we. She is usually someone with breasts and a vagina. He usually has a ride. Amen.

Plato told
—e.e. Cummings

plato told

him:he couldn't
believe it(jesus

told him;he
wouldn't believe
it)lao

tsze
certainly told
him,and general
(yes
mam)
sherman;
and even
(believe it
or
not)you
told him:i told
him;we told him
(he didn't believe it,no
sir)it took
a nipponized bit of
the old sixth
avenue
el;in the top of his head:to tell
him
 
And yes, PoetGuy, I think that most of the more amateur I I I poems are a means of getting it out, expressing experiences and feelings-- which is fine, serves its purpose, the intent of the writer, and if the reader enjoys it than I figure no harm no foul.

I generally do not feel the need to comment on such poems unless there is a poetic glimmer in a line or phrase that I feel compelled to point out.

I also know the folks who write the I want to die kind of poems I love you so much poems must detest some of the poems I enjoy.

Thanks for this topic, a good jumping off point.
 
PoetGuy said:
Poet Guy suspects this is why some poets react so negatively to certain kinds of criticism of their poems, because they identify so strongly with the text they have written that any remark, however mild or technical, is perceived as being directed at them personally, i.e.to the poet, rather than at the text of their poem.


Poet Guy would think that tanka, like most Asian forms, would not be the kind of poem
that would raise the question about whether the poet identified strongly with the "I" of the poem. But Poet Guy does not profess any knowledge of Asian forms, and anything he would say about them would be brainless chatter.

He will merely say that tanka was not what he was thinking of when he started this thread.
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Yes I think this is the truth. I think, given their limited experience, they cannot separate their work from themselves. They see it as an extension, like a limb. I actually work as a writer from time to time and I deal with editors a lot. If you feel this way about your work, you are going to be crushed in the professional arena.

Yes, tanka is kind of a surprise. The author of such a poem is encouraged to be subject and speak about his or her personal feelings. It often goes object, then commentary in this form. I often write tanka, that although there is an 'I' in it, it is not me and others it is. Here's one of mine:


the smell of your aftershave
still in the bathroom cupboard
a year later
when I find the things you left behind
I still cry​
 
Disagree with your statement about reader perception of first person narrative in fiction. The reader is often lead to believe a novel is a memoir of the author. No difference in poetry, save for the fact that someone presenting a fictional "I" is poetry is poopooed by community. In fiction readers and critics go so far as to give the narrator the author's name where no name was given ie Remembrance of Things Past
 
Epmd607 said:
Disagree with your statement about reader perception of first person narrative in fiction. The reader is often lead to believe a novel is a memoir of the author. No difference in poetry, save for the fact that someone presenting a fictional "I" is poetry is poopooed by community. In fiction readers and critics go so far as to give the narrator the author's name where no name was given ie Remembrance of Things Past
Click to expand...

I think poetry and fiction are different cases.I agree that readers tend to see the narrator as the author.

In poetry, new poets tend to lean on the 'I' for immediacy. It is poopooed by other poets because it is hard to do well. It tends to encourage new poets to run into overblown emotions and the abstract. Abstract emotional poems are hard to do without turning into mush. In poetry better work come from focusing on the concrete and allowing the reader to bring their own emotional response to what they are reading. One example I used before. Which is better?:

He loves me

or

He brings me chocolates and nurses me when I am sick. Roses come everyday.
 
Pronouns are relational, they are relative.

In my poetry, the I in the poem is whoever is relating to the you, whoever is a part of we and on the other side of they.

Sometimes my writing comes from an I center, sometimes it comes from a You center, but it is never wholly autobiographical and never wholly separate from who I am (or who I is) Sometimes I would identify myself more with the She or the They in a poem, putting myself to the side. I always try to put the reader somewhere in my poem. Between the headlights or in the passenger side. Although sometimes standing on the sidewalk wondering wtf just flew by.
 
It all depends is the only true answer I can give to the original question (are you speaking confessionally or speaking through a persona?) and I believe that's as it should be as I've done both. It would be a bit worrying if all my 'I' poems were confessional as I've written about murder more than once! I think I've read that you should write about what you know and I have used the wild countryside where I grew up many times as a backdrop but in case we are being 'watched' I promise I haven't knocked anyone off in the marshes.
 
I don't see a difference here between prose and poetry. Niether when I read or write.

An "I" is the first person protagonist. Sometimes it's autobiographical, sometimes it's autobiographical and fictional (as in, what would my thoughts and actions be in this or that situation), sometimes it's a biographical or fictional charachter.

And now and then, you'll find a "he" or "she" that is in fact the poet.

Which it is is nothing that is spelled out, and nothing that a reader should take for granted.
 
PoetGuy said:
Poet Guy suspects this is why some poets react so negatively to certain kinds of criticism of their poems, because they identify so strongly with the text they have written that any remark, however mild or technical, is perceived as being directed at them personally, i.e.to the poet, rather than at the text of their poem.
Poet Guy would think that tanka, like most Asian forms, would not be the kind of poem that would raise the question about whether the poet identified strongly with the "I" of the poem. But Poet Guy does not profess any knowledge of Asian forms, and anything he would say about them would be brainless chatter.

He will merely say that tanka was not what he was thinking of when he started this thread.
Click to expand...

First person syndrome is the poet's curse. It is very difficult for readers to see a character in a poem. If the personal pronoun is used, they assume the writer is speaking to them and everything presented is true feeling, if not actually true.

The other side of the problem is when it is true feeling and actual fact. The comments are seen as personal criticism. Even suggestions of changes which improve the flow will be rejected, if it changes the feeling and experience. The poem is meant to be either a diagnosis or a news report, where fact is more important than presentation.

I once posted a poem about a man who had money problems. He can't afford to pay both his child support and buy a plane ticket so his 7 year old daughter can come see him for the summer. He decides to mow lawns on weekends, deliver pizza at nights, and stiff his landlord for a months rent. It's a real tear jerker.

People offered to loan me money.
 
as i write, the I belongs to whomsoever's narrating the poem. that was rarely myself, especially in the beginning, but is more common nowadays. and even if it is myself, it may not be the me i am in this reality, this life, this world, but anyone of an infinite number of I's; it might well be my thoughts as voiced through another's body, or another's thoughts as spoken through mine. sometimes the only presence i have in a poem is the fact i strung it together. it really doesn't matter a whole lot: what matters to me is that the poem is its own truth; creates its own now.

when i read a poem, i tend to read it for itself and try not to make assumptions on how much of the I is the author ... my previous explanation of how i approach a write probably explains this. having said that, some are so real, so now, so brimful of memory/emotion that they can take me two places: straight into feeling this is the author speaking of personal things, or - possibly when a poet's done the best job they can, so much so that they engage the reader totally - allows the reader to step right into that I and live the experience created. and then again, sometimes the author remains the I and the reader becomes the You.
 
It's nice to be back online and reading interesting topics like this:)

If I write "I" in a poem, then it is me (or was me, or might be me, or could be me--except some recent historical poems), but I won't publish such a poem unless I think that "I" might be "you" or "them". If it can't attach to another person, can't communicate beyond the personal then it might as well remain in the drawer. The Plath poem quoted above is a good example of something that seems personal but is in fact universal, where the "I" modulates imperceptibly into "you" or "us".
 
Epmd607 said:
Disagree with your statement about reader perception of first person narrative in fiction. The reader is often lead to believe a novel is a memoir of the author. No difference in poetry, save for the fact that someone presenting a fictional "I" is poetry is poopooed by community. In fiction readers and critics go so far as to give the narrator the author's name where no name was given ie Remembrance of Things Past
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Poet Guy will respectfully disagree with your disagreement, Epmd607. At least with part of your disagreement.

Yes, it is not uncommon for a writer of fiction to present a novel as if it were a memoir, but Poet Guy believes it is unusual for a reader of said novel to believe this, i.e. read the novel as if it was memoir, and true (as much as any autobiography is "true," in any case). The rare exception might be something like James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, which was marketed as a memoir but later shown to be fictionalized to a significant degree. Poet Guy likes to believe that readers do not read novels and memoirs as if they were interchangable--that the function of "I" in Jane Eyre is fundamentally different than the function of "I" in Up from Slavery.

In addition, your example of "fiction readers go[ing] so far as to give the narrator the author's name were no name was given" seems specious, at least in the case of In Search of Lost Time. Proust himself at least suggests this identification, albeit coyly, in La prisonnière: « Maintenant elle a commencé à parler ; ses premiers mots étaient « chéri » ou « mon chéri, » a suivi de mon Nom de baptême, qui, si nous donnons au narrateur le même nom que l'auteur de ce livre, produirait « Marcel chéri » ou « mon Marcel chéri. »

Even if the narrator is explicitly named with the author's name or if the convention of readers and critics is to call an unnamed narrator by the author's name this does not mean that readers identify the character with the author. (One never knows about critics, of course.)

Poet Guy still believes that as regards fiction, assuming it is properly classified, the general reader does not identify the narrator of the fiction with the author of the fiction, even in the case of a roman à clef.

That is, at least in part, what "fiction" means.
 
Epmd607 said:
No difference in poetry, save for the fact that someone presenting a fictional "I" is poetry is poopooed by community.
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Poet Guy found this statement interesting, though in his judgment almost certainly wrong (of course, that perhaps depends on one's definition of "community.")

Does Epmd607 have any examples of a fictional "I" being "poopooed by [a poetry] community"?

Does Epmd607 think that readers of poetry do not believe that writing other than a kind of personal reportage is valuable? PoetGuy thinks this doubtful (again, depending on the community), but an interesting idea. It would perhaps explain the tepid response some of his first person poems receive.
 
vrosej10 said:
I think poetry and fiction are different cases. I agree that readers tend to see the narrator as the author.
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Poet Guy assumes you mean that poetry readers tend to see the narrator as the author.

He thinks this is perhaps true for some readers, perhaps most readers. That is why he started this thread--to get some feedback from others on how they think about "I" in a poem.

Curiously, in re the poem on another forum that initially sparked Poet Guy's question, the poem about depression that he abstracted in his initial post and which tended to receive sympathy expressions rather than commentary on the poem itself, the author of that poem has now posted a comment in response that essentially says, "Thanks for your sympathy but I am not depressed. I was writing a poem about depression, not experiencing it."

Poet Guy is still curious as to why readers interpret poems this way.
 
SeattleRain said:
Pronouns are relational, they are relative.

In my poetry, the I in the poem is whoever is relating to the you, whoever is a part of we and on the other side of they.

Sometimes my writing comes from an I center, sometimes it comes from a You center, but it is never wholly autobiographical and never wholly separate from who I am (or who I is) Sometimes I would identify myself more with the She or the They in a poem, putting myself to the side. I always try to put the reader somewhere in my poem. Between the headlights or in the passenger side. Although sometimes standing on the sidewalk wondering wtf just flew by.
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Poet Guy generally agrees with this, SeattleRain. While his poems may originate with personal experience (in some way must originate with personal experience, even if that experience is simply reading Wikipedia), they are always abstracted to some degree. For example, if Poet Guy writes a love poem directed at a particular woman, the "I" in the poem may to a great extent resemble Poet Guy, the "you" or "her" in the poem may resemble to a great extent the object of his affection, but the actual poem is not really about Poet Guy nor about the object of his attention--it is about an abstracted relationship and reading too much personal detail into it is unsound.
 
Angeline said:
Hey PG stop daydreaming about my dimpled knees and contemplate that there is actually a form, the dramatic monologue, that is all about "I." Robert Browning's poems (Andrea del Sarto and The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St Praxed's Church are two of my favorites).

Yes, yes I know you wanted to hear about our poems, but I said that in my first post. <knees>
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Poet Guy was not daydreaming, he was observing. Observational detail is the fundament of imagery, and imagery is the fundament of poetry.

Poet Guy has been assigned Browning before, so he is aware of the dramatic monologue. He cannot say he is especially fond of Mr. Browning, but he appreciates Angeline's links and will sample some of these poems.
 
bronzeage said:
First person syndrome is the poet's curse. It is very difficult for readers to see a character in a poem. If the personal pronoun is used, they assume the writer is speaking to them and everything presented is true feeling, if not actually true.
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Poet Guy found this statement extremely interesting, as it seems to imply that a poem that is abstracted, or written with "I" as a persona rather than as the author him- or herself is somehow not true.

Poet Guy certainly does not mean to imply that himself. He believes that poems, good poems, express truth, even if they are conceptually fictional.

Poems may express other things as well--clever language, humor, intricate stories--but the best poems express truth in a way that it can be experienced by the reader, just as the best fiction expresses truth, even though the story may not be literally "true."

A very interesting comment, bronzeage. Thank you. Poet Guy will be off thinking about this for some time.
 
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