# Appearance and Reality: Who is the “I” in a Poem?



## PiP (Nov 24, 2016)

[FONT=&Verdana]by Clark

[/FONT](Originally published in WiFs 28)

_NOTE: This thumbnail is designed for non-poets and, possibly, for those very new to the art._
_I wrote a poem once about dreams. The poem was presented through the eyes of a first-person narrator–the “I” of the poem. I read the poem at a poetry event; afterwards, a woman came up to me and expressed sympathy for all the suffering I had endured, as ‘recorded’ in the poem. I explained that I had never experienced any of the suffering depicted in the poem, which was entirely a work of the imagination. She said that the first-person imagery was so intense it could only come from direct experience. Besides, I had put myself in the poem as narrator, so the content must spring from ‘real’ experience._
_While it is true that serious poets project their values, beliefs, mores, and hopes–and a great deal more–into their work, it is beyond ludicrous to insist that the speaker of a poem is the author of the poem, literally. The poet as a person-in-the-world eats, sleeps, discharges waste, picks his nose, thinks, yawns, farts, drives a car, hits his thumb with a hammer, goes to the bar to play crib. This functioning creature cannot be the speaker of the poem. As I say . . . ludicrous._
[FONT=&Verdana]_Even in an intensely personal poem that springs directly from a poet’s deepest beliefs..._

*Continued on Showcase <HERE>*

Please share your thoughts![/FONT]


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## midnightpoet (Nov 24, 2016)

I realize many of the poems here are personal, but I never like to assume so (and of course we know what ass u me does:friendly_wink.  Just because it may sound personal, it may not be.  I've mentioned here before that critiquing poetry is hard because you are in effect trying to read minds - but for the poet, he/she should be able to write it the way they want to, and not be intimidated to do it another way because of what other people think (publishers can be exempt from this, of course:icon_cheesygrin.


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## The Fantastical (Nov 25, 2016)

I don't see to have an 'I" in any or my work poetry or otherwise. I always try and go for as much of a third person angle as I can. I always say "You" "They" or just don't have a pronoun and you words like "The". 

Am I odd?


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## aj47 (Nov 25, 2016)

This is one of the things that annoys me the most...the assumption that my I is always personal.  When I write about a squirrel, no one thinks its me, but as soon as it's a human, >bam< someone will assume it's my voice narrating.  Even my creative writing instructor did that with a poem I wrote.

When I was a child, we didn't have video games (or a lot of money), so we did a lot of role-playing games.  More than playing house--we were superheros, characters from novels or from TV shows, or totally made up people.  So I grew into the notion of borrowing a voice.  I never played baseball but I've written about it from the perspective of players in various roles, for example.  I've written with the voice of killers--I am not a murderer.  Also, I've taken flack for writing about issues with a survivor's voice that wasn't mine--but dayum, it's what I know how to do to cast light on the topic.  

I think, all in all, that this is sometimes part of the problem with getting good critique.  It needs to clearly be spelled out if the "you" who needs to change something is the author or the protagonist.  I realize the author is responsible for both, but personalizing the issue doesn't help keep the critique on-track as being about the work, rather than the author.


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## Ariel (Nov 25, 2016)

I like to say that I write fictional personal poetry. Parts of a poem may be personal while a great deal of it is fictionalized. I write with the personal pronoun because it is more immediate for the reader and inserts them into the poem.


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## Firemajic (Nov 25, 2016)

amsawtell said:


> I like to say that I write fictional personal poetry. Parts of a poem may be personal while a great deal of it is fictionalized. I write with the personal pronoun because it is more immediate for the reader and inserts them into the poem.




I agree... using "I" also creates an intimacy between writer and reader....


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## EmmaSohan (Nov 25, 2016)

Do you take "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" as being about Frost? Saying anything about Frost?


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## Ariel (Nov 25, 2016)

EmmaSohan said:


> Do you take "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" as being about Frost? Saying anything about Frost?



No.  I don't. The poem may have been based on a real event but I don't believe it was about Frost.


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## clark (Nov 26, 2016)

Some very interesting and insightful comments.  This is very much a poet's topic--readers who do NOT write poetry never give the "I" persona a thought.  Why should they?  As long as they enter the world of the poem as given and _stay there_, they both honour the parameters of the poem and open themselves to a potentially rich aesthetic experience.  Unfortunately,many readers use poetry as a springboard into--at worst--some pretty wild speculations about the poet's life, loves, politics, hangups, etc.  Indulging like this is dangerous, because it begs concrete status for phantoms, whose existence is held often in the mind of the commenter much more than in the text of the  poem.


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## EmmaSohan (Nov 26, 2016)

If you tell me Robert Frost never stopped in the woods in front of two roads and had to decide which one to take, I don't care. (I do the same thing in prose -- I took a real event I want to write about and put it inside a fictional scene because it worked better there. Everything got changed but the main idea.)

But. If "I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference." isn't about Robert Frost, then the poem is a fraud. To me. Write it in third person.

One could take the path less traveled,
And that might make all the difference.


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## clark (Nov 27, 2016)

Emma -- ah yes!  you've dug up the body I'd just as soon see six feet under solid concrete!  It is SO difficult often to get a handle on the poet within the poem.  Take the extreme example of ALL of Robert Browning's major poems, including the twelve books of _The Ring and the Book _(longest poem in English).  All his major poems are dramatic monologues, actively spoken by a first-person persona.  Most of these personae are aberrant personalities, murderers, hedonists, heretics, arrogant bastards, users and exploiters.  It is EASY to declare that Robert Browning, that Victorian gentleman of dignity and solid values, is most assuredly NOT to be identified with these (often) monsters.  But there is nothing implicit in the structural or emotional 'functionality' of the first-person narrator in poetry to enable us to reject identification of poet/character for Browning. . .but _insist _on identification for Frost.  Why must Frost have some personal experience behind the "I" of 'snowy evening', but not so Browning?  Is it because Frost's poem intensely mirrors our own experiences, or reflects our own positive dreams and memories?  Probably.  But we can hardly use each of our personal experiences as some sort of benchmark for literary discussion.  Firemajic (above) introduces a key concept in coming to terms with the first-person narrator:  INTIMACY.  We feel the presence of a speaking person much more than the more detached third person.  And it is no accident that technical descriptions and instructions--where the writer's aim is total focus on the 'object' and obliteration of the human 'doer'--are almost always written in the depersonalized passive voice.  Maybe we can agree that the "I" speaker creates an _illusion of intimacy _between poet and reader., because I'm damned if I can figure out how to filter a poem like 'snowy evening' into aspects of pure projection and/or imagination and aspects springing directly from Frost's experience.  For just that reason, I would hope that Emma might pull back from tagging the poem a 'fraud' if it did NOT spring from his experience.  How are we to know?  And does it really make a difference in \OUR experience of the poem?  By the way--I have no answers to these questions.  I just find them fascinating and, by constantly asking them, I peel back just a little more of the layers of mystery that veil our relationship with poetry.  And I think in some perverse way, banging my head against these walls somehow makes me a better poet.  Or maybe just more comfortably delusional. . . . .


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## EmmaSohan (Nov 27, 2016)

I agree. I am not exactly sure what I am agreeing to, but I have run into similar confusing issues in writing prose.

Maybe the difference between Browning and Frost is me. Browning obviously was not writing about himself, any more than my first person stories are about me.

Again, I don't care if Frost ever rode a horse, that part is just a metaphor anyway. But I assumed he was telling us his feelings. The poem doesn't mean as much to me if he wasn't, and then I wish he had written it in third person.

And nothing about that was true of him, why was he even writing the poem? Just throwing around words? Which I know gets to what a poem is supposed to accomplish, probably another awkward issue.


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## Ariel (Nov 27, 2016)

Why would it matter so much if the poem was about his emotions or not?  I don't know how much of Frost's poems are true or about himself.  And it doesn't matter.  You can still learn something from it or identify with it, right?


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## aj47 (Nov 27, 2016)

Does a story need to be true to be good?  How is a poem different?


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## Gumby (Nov 28, 2016)

When I write a poem and put 'I' in it, there is usually a bit of me in it, but sometimes it is just that you are putting yourself into an imagined situation, empathizing if you will and using imagination, like others have stated. Yes, you might draw on past experience for the emotion, even if you've not been in that _particular _place. That doesn't make it any less real and certainly doesn't mean it is a fraud. If someone thinks that the 'I' in a poem is really me, (or you) then we have succeeded in drawing them into the poem.


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## EmmaSohan (Nov 28, 2016)

I am often a judge for the nonfiction writing contest here. The stories are powerful, and one reason is that they are true stories about the writer. So, to me, it is obvious that true stories are more powerful. I can also learn a lot more from truth than fiction. Yes, first person truth makes a big difference.

Also, in my tiny poem below, I was trying to share something about my experience. To share, the reader has to understand that "I" really is me.



> I with my fragile dreams,
> I had imagined more



If you say that, for example, Frost's poem is not about him, you are taking away his ability to write powerful poetry, and you are taking away his ability to share. You don't want to do that, right?


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