We tend to think of works of literature as a mode of speech. Most people, when reading, would describe it as hearing a voice inside their head. However, speech is what is called ‘an ephemeral medium’ which means it perishes the moment it is uttered. This therefore forces us to recognize the disparity between the person who once wrote the poem and the voice we hear in out head.
Many Romantics take the view that a poem’s speaker is the poet expressing his or her own unique and intimate feelings and experiences. They support the idea that poetry is a spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions and that the reader accidentally ‘hears’ this private outburst of feeling. But doesn’t this type of reading surely exclude any possibility of a poet writing about an experience they have not had themselves?
One of the basic ideas behind New Criticism, however, is to always assume that the speaker of a poem is someone other than the poet himself. This allows the reader to become much more involved in the poem, forcing them to make some sort of decision about who the speaker is, what his situation is and who he seems to be addressing (if anyone). More than this, however, is the fact that it is important to distinguish between the poet and the speaker because the sense of hearing a human voice is a deliberate effect of the poem itself; it is not some accidental, overheard outpouring of spontaneous thought, but a text that has been carefully crafted and redrafted many times over by the poet to achieve a specific effect.
Continuing with the idea that the speaker of a poem is not the poet, we can distinguish between the three main genres of poetry by considering who it is that is speaking. In narrative poetry, the actions, thoughts and speech of a character are presented by a narrator. While this may seem similar to the poet, note that the narrator, whether first or third person, is always a part of a text’s fictional world and effect and therefore could have specific prejudices and opinions that are not those of the poet himself.
A flexible form of poem, the lyric poem concerns itself with a wide variety of thoughts and emotions and is written from the point of view of one particular speaker. They can be about anything from religious experiences, political comment, love, lust, mourning, philosophy or a wide range of topics.
Dramatic poetry is written in the form of drama but is designed to be read as opposed to performed. Sometimes it very closely resembles drama by explicitly placing two or more characters in a dialogue with each other but sometimes multi-voiced poems leave it to the reader to identify what is happening and how to characterize each separate voice. In dramatic lyrics, the speaker will address another person who is present, although this addressee will not make a reply.
In the 19th Century, a number of poets developed the dramatic lyric into the dramatic monologue. These poems are uttered by a single speaker in a specific situation at a crucial moment. Like dramatic lyrics, they address one or more person who is in the situation with them, but any reply from these addressees are not given. What is important about the speakers of dramatic monologues is that their utterance slowly reveals his or her character to the reader and this character is very usually unstable, deranged or otherwise abnormal. A good example of this would be Robert Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ in which the speaker, the Duke, sees a diplomat admiring a portrait of the Duke’s late wife. Whilst talking to the diplomat about the portrait, it is slowly revealed that his wife, who is described as beautiful with a glimmer of a smile in her eyes, had an affair and so he had her killed.
Ultimately, it is important to be aware that the speakers of poems are in fact fictions created by the poet to achieve effect. Recognition of the textuality (written nature) of poems enabled us to understand that the notion of the speaker is one of the effects of that textuality; texts do not come from speakers, speakers come from texts.
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