Definition of a Speaker in Poetry

Poetic Terms You Have to Learn

The Speaker

In order to begin any poetic analysis, it is important that you know what the major pieces and players are called. You would not believe how much harm it does to your grade when you refer to a collection of related lines in a poem as a paragraph, the person who is making the poetic utterance as the narrator or the writer, and a single line as a sentence. None of these terms is bad on its own, and all have valid uses in other areas of literary studies. However, in the case of poetry, they will do nothing but show others that you are not familiar with the terminology you need.

One of the first distinctions that needs to be made, and one that fails to be made again and again in classrooms from high school to the final years of university, is between the author (or writer, or poet), and the speaker of the poem. This is a similar distinction to the one that needs to be made in literary prose between the author and the narrator; at no time should you refer to the person who is uttering a piece of creative writing as the author or writer. There may be times when you are tempted to do this, and there may seem to be compelling reasons: the speaker may use the first person I, she might say things that you know the real author to believe, and she may even state that this is me, the author, who says these things to you now. However, you must resist all of these temptations, and refer to the person saying the poem as the speaker. It will always be right, and others will always understand your meaning.

This might seem like a very fine, minor, even unimportant point, but it is a foundational principle of literary criticism. When an author writes a work, he or she constructs a persona, who may be very much like the author, or almost nothing like that person at all. It is as if the writer is slipping into a role, becoming an actor for a time, and so just as you would not confuse a character with the person playing him or her in a film, so too should you avoid confusing the speaker of a poem with the person who has created that persona. This is also important when it comes to issues of freedom of speech and legality; an author cannot be held liable for what the speaker of a poem says, no matter how objectionable.

The next point is one we have already touched on briefly above; the speaker of a poem seems to fill essentially the same role as the narrator of a novel, but under no circumstances should you attempt to use the terms interchangeably. Again, this might seem like an insignificant distinction, but it rests in the very definition of the terms, and contradicts these when used improperly. Remember, the word narrator comes from the word narrative. A narrative is a story, a series of interconnected events which (usually) progresses through a beginning, middle, and end, in a way that builds excitement to a climactic point. A poem, on the other hand, is not a narrative at all. It usually tells no story, contains no plot, and focuses on the creation of diverse and powerful emotions, rather than the creation of tension, conflict, and excitement. So, the term narrator simply doesn't apply. The only appropriate substitute is speaker, which underlines the aural aspects of poetry, even when it appears in written form. The concern for voice and sound is expressed by the term, taking it away from any focus on narrative or story.

Definition of a Speaker in Poetry

Source: https://essayscam.org/forum/rt/speaker-poetic-terms-4170/

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