The Speaker as Character: Principles of Voice

A lecture by Jonathan McClure

Overview — 0:00:01

Today’s focus is the speaker of a poem as a character—what goes into how a speaker is characterized, and how different elements of voice give a poem its distinctive personality. Much of this applies equally to prose fiction (where you have a distinct narrator or character-voice) and even to nonfiction (in terms of how you present your narrative self on the page).

The Speaker Is Always a Character — 0:02:00

Emily Dickinson put this plainly in a letter: “When I state myself as the representative of the verse, it does not mean me, but a supposed person.” A poem’s I is always a construction, even when the poet is writing from life. You can have a speaker who is obviously a character—a stapler, Napoleon, whoever—but even when you write as yourself, you never get all of yourself onto the page. You’re making decisions about what to say and what to leave out, how to present yourself in this poem at this moment. So even confessional writing produces a character who is a version of, but never identical to, the actual person. It can be helpful to step back and read your own poem as if you were a stranger encountering it cold: what does this character look like based only on what’s on the page?

The layers of a poem’s cast — 0:04:00

Every poem involves several overlapping presences. There is the speaker—whoever is saying the words. There is the implied author—the sensibility behind the poem that may not agree with or fully endorse the speaker, the way the real Stephen Colbert didn’t believe anything his on-air persona said, but never broke character. There is often a listener—someone being addressed, whether a beloved, a god, a tree in the yard, or just the speaker’s own interior. And there are the readers, who exist whether the speaker acknowledges them or not, and who need certain information to follow the poem even if the speaker would never naturally hand that information over. Negotiating between what the speaker would plausibly say and what the reader needs to know is one of the craft challenges of writing in a distinct voice.

What Characterizes a Speaker — 0:08:00

This is a non-exhaustive list, but some of the most useful elements: tone and diction—do they use slangy, day-to-day language, or overblown old-fashioned language? A regional dialect? Syntax—simple and direct, or ornate and flowery? Register—elevated or down-to-earth? Rhythm and music of the words. Use of form—does the speaker reach for rhyme and meter, or free verse? Attitude toward themselves and others—are they self-aware? Self-deceiving? Warm toward the listener or cold? What they notice—cultural references, types of imagery, what stands out to them in a room or a landscape. And what they argue for—what are they trying to convince you of, or convince themselves of?

An Obvious Character Voice: Tennyson’s Ulysses — 0:10:00

The easiest place to see character construction at work is when the speaker is obviously not the poet. Tennyson’s “Ulysses” is spoken by Odysseus after he has finally returned home and gone stir-crazy, dreaming of being back at sea. He addresses his sailors, describes his son Telemachus, and ultimately pushes off to sail again.

The characterization is remarkable for how much comes through without ever being stated. He’s aristocratic, grandiose, restless, condescending about the people of his own homeland—”a savage race that hoard and sleep and feed and know not me.” His description of Telemachus is ostensibly praise, but the language gives him away: Telemachus is “decent not to fail in offices of tenderness,” which is faint praise at best, delivered by a man who clearly sees himself as a heroic visionary and his son as merely a competent administrator. The implied author behind the poem seems at least partly critical of Ulysses—we get the sense of a man who can’t function in ordinary life and can’t see his own predicament clearly—even as there’s some degree of sympathy for his restlessness.

One participant noted a moment where Ulysses describes seeing the great Achilles “whom we knew”—an odd detail, since of course all these men know who Achilles is. It’s an example of clunky exposition: giving information to the reader in a way no real speaker would actually phrase it. The technique of “you are my brother, and you know well that X” is a common trap to avoid.

A Wounded, Neurotic Voice: Meg Freitag — 0:22:00

From a book called Edith—the speaker’s pet parakeet, eaten by the speaker’s dog, to whom all the poems are addressed as a kind of prayer—a very different sort of character emerges. The opening poem addresses Edith directly: “I’ve come to demand the light I’m used to. Edith, I’m done with things that are bigger than me. The moon can go fuck itself, for instance.”

What makes this voice work is its strategic looseness. Phrases like truth is and spooky as hell aren’t strictly necessary—you could cut them for compression—but they do necessary work for the voice: they give the sense that we’re hearing something close to unfiltered thought, conversation rather than polished utterance. The speaker is also very self-aware: she “studied grief, like how an artist studies art history, trying to see what others had already done with it in order to do it better.” She notices her own pretensions without forgiving herself for them, which makes her feel trustworthy—we sense she’ll tell us the truth as she sees it, even when it’s unflattering. And despite all the wounded neurosis, the images are extremely precise and vivid: “a teaspoon of strawberry jam” for what was left of the parakeet; the elaborate fantasies about how the significant other might die or leave; the final deflation of two Diet Dr. Peppers. The poem isn’t worried about being likable, and because of that it becomes likable.

A Self-Deceiving Speaker: Alan Shapiro — 0:35:00

The next example—”Larkinesque” by Alan Shapiro—offers a speaker who is obviously trying to convince himself of something he doesn’t believe. Reading a psychological study about how beautiful people are treated differently, the speaker reflects on his own unremarkable looks, concludes that great beauty would have caused him nothing but trouble, and ends by assuring himself that no, of course he doesn’t feel the lack of it—not at all. The poem’s title acknowledges that it’s working in the vein of Philip Larkin, whose bleakness it emulates.

The tells are subtle but legible: the speaker talks with a woman at lunch who clearly suspects him of being interested only in sex, which suggests he’s done something to earn that suspicion. The protesting-too-much ending—No, of course not. It won’t.—is unconvincing precisely because the poem has built so carefully toward it. The implied author knows the speaker is fooling himself; the speaker doesn’t fully realize it. Because a poem has so few words, every small tell carries disproportionate weight. One participant observed that these signals register without always being consciously identified—you feel something is off before you can say what.

A Restrained, Controlled Voice — 0:47:00

A third contemporary example—about a divorce, addressed to a former spouse—works through a very different kind of speaker: precise, almost preoccupied with not being misunderstood, continuously self-correcting. It may not be the ghostly ballet of our avoidances that they’ll remember… No, what I think will haunt them is precisely what we’ve chosen to forget. This speaker can’t bring himself to say “I’m sad”—he has to approach his own feelings indirectly, through a prediction about what will haunt the children. The restraint itself becomes part of the portrait: here is someone who holds himself very tightly in check, and what comes through is not the sadness directly but the effort of containing it.

One participant noted that the voice’s control made them wonder whether the emotional reticence was also what had caused the marriage to fail. The speaker gets caught up in remembering a moment of dancing through the house—we’d sway, we’d twirl, we’d dip and cha-cha—and then the sentences grow shorter and choppier as the memory deflates and he falls back into the present: for you and me, ourselves, alone, apart, still not enough. The unraveling is enacted in the syntax.

A Cold, Prickly Voice: Louise Glück — 0:54:00

Glück’s “Vespers” is an evening prayer addressed directly to God, and it is full of barbs. “Once I believed in you; I planted a fig tree. Here in Vermont, country of no summer, it was a test. If the tree lived, it would mean you existed. By this logic, you do not exist.” The voice is spiky, unapologetic, doesn’t go out of its way to make you like it—and precisely because it doesn’t, it feels honest. Glück’s speakers, even across a collection full of talking flowers, tend to have this quality: they will say exactly what they think and couldn’t care less whether you find it appealing.

This is a useful alternative model. Many of us are inclined to seem personable in our poems, and that inclination can soften or blunt what we’re actually trying to say. A speaker who is simply direct—who offers their unvarnished thoughts and trusts the reader to stay—can create a different and equally strong kind of connection, one that comes from recognizing the honesty rather than from warmth.

A Voice That Carries Its Learning Lightly: Robert Hass — 0:58:00

“Lament” begins in an unexpected place: a childhood ritual in which the speaker’s father ground up a prescription medication and dissolved it in water, watching his wife drink it each morning to prevent her from drinking alcohol. The poem is full of cultural references—comic strips from the 1940s, a passage from the Aeneid, the philosophical work named in the title—but they arrive with the ease of casual conversation rather than the weight of erudition. “You know that passage in the Aeneid”—he doesn’t assume you know it, but he doesn’t assume you don’t. He gives you what you need while seeming to just be talking.

What the poem refuses to do is conclude. It ends: “We get our first moral ideas about the world, about justice and power and gender and the order of things from somewhere.” It circles around the question of whether the father was doing the right thing, whether the ritual was a form of care or a form of control, and it never answers. That refusal is itself a characterization—a speaker who has spent years unpacking something and arrived not at a verdict but at a recognition that all of this must have formed him, in ways he can’t fully trace. One participant said the final line landed hard for them: something is off, but the child in the poem doesn’t know exactly what, and neither does the adult looking back.

Closing Thoughts — 1:05:00

The range of voices available to a poet—confident or uncertain, warm or prickly, self-deceiving or self-aware, garrulous or restrained—is one of the most pleasurable resources of the form. Reading poems with an eye toward what the poet is doing to give us a sense of the person talking, and how they do it, can be a useful practice to bring back to your own work. The question to keep asking is: based only on what’s on the page, who is this character?