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Lyrical poems12/2/2023 ![]() Nor is it the case in fiction, nor even in non-fiction, autobiography, personal essay, etc. It's particularly tempting to do so in the case of poetry, in which we (as I said above) consistently assume that a poetic production is the authentic, unmediated expression of the poet's subjectivity. "Gender" is more appropriate here, because the speaker participates in conventions of masculine/feminine behavior (speech patterns, desire, self-imagining) as defined by culture.Īnd at no point can the speaker of a poem be assimilated to/conflated with its poet. The speaker of a poem is a fictional creation, without any body or physical existence. I think it's fine that you're making a point to use "sex" here (although I don't see why you really would want to), but it's not appropriate given the terms of a serious discussion of poetry (for instance, one which would turn upon the question of a "lyric I"). No, honestly, this is a disciplinary question. Well, I haven't personally verified Landor's, Dickinson's, and Wordsworth's genitalia, so I guess I'll defer to you on their sex. The poet (if her goal truly is "self-expression," which is a dubious claim at best) can only achieve such self-expression through the interpolation of a character who she is not - the speaker/narrator. We can discuss the degree to which the speaker's position/desire/affect may correspond with the poet's position/desire/affect, but we can't conflate the two. We have an immense propensity in poetry to assume that any given poem is the authentic, unmediated expression of the person writing it, but this is simply untrue and theoretically unhelpful. In other words, Edgar Poe is very different from the speaker of "The Raven," Robert Browning is very different from the speaker/narrator of "His Last Duchess," and - yes - Shakespeare is very different from the speaker of "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" The "poet" is the person who wrote the poem, not the force imagined to be speaking the words of the poem, just like the novelist writes the novel but the narrator is the force imagined to be writing the words of the novel. So most "speakers" will, in fact, have discernable or arguable genders "lyric I's" will generally have none. ![]() The first is symbolic, and the second imaginary the first mathematical, the second expressive the first is structural, the second is the impression of depth produced by the structure.Īt most levels of analysis, this distinction is unimportant (only in terms of the theory of lyric is the distinction really necessary). In other words, the "lyrical I" is a lyrical function (exactly an "it" since it's an effect of certain rhetorical and abstract formulae), while the "speaker" is the illusory personification imagined by the reader as being "behind" that lyrical function. This is somewhat different from the "lyrical I," which is the discursive position from which a lyric could be spoken. One more distinction: the "speaker" is the character who, according to what is implied in the lyrical poem, could be imagined as speaking the words written in the text. ![]() ![]() (And I would strongly suggest that speaker is the correct term, and that narrator is inappropriate for lyric poetry.) I would even argue that the speaker of "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is male. ![]() But it's equally fair to say that the speaker of Baudelaire's "Jewels" is male, even though it's not specified. I think, for instance, that it's fair to say that the speaker of "My Last Duchess" is male, although that's a narrative poem and it makes the speaker's gender pretty clear. ![]()
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