Super Glossary

Poetic Speaker

Entertainment / Literature / Poetic Speaker: The narrative or elegiac voice in a poem (such as a sonnet, ode, or lyric) that speaks of his or her situation or feelings. It is a convention in poetry that the speaker is not the same individual as the historical author of the poem. For instance, consider the poet Lord Byron's mock epic Don Juan. Lord Byron wrote the poem as a young man in his late twenties. However, the speaker of the poem depicts himself as being an elderly man looking back cynically on the days of youth. Clearly, the 'voice' talking and narrating the story is not identical with the author. In the same way, the speaker of the poem 'My Last Duchess' characterizes himself through his words as a Renaissance nobleman in Italy who is cold-blooded--quite capable of murdering a wife who displeases him--but the author of the poem was actually Robert Browning, a mild-mannered English poet writing in the early nineteenth-century. Many students (and literary critics) attempt to decipher clues about the author's own attitudes, beliefs, feelings, or biographical details through the words in a poem. However, such an activity must always be done with caution. Shakespeare may write a sonnet in which the poetic speaker pours out his passion for a woman with bad breath and wiry black hair (Sonnet 130), but it does not necessarily mean that Shakespeare himself was attracted to halitosis, or that his wife had black hair, or that he had a fling with such a woman. In fact, it is a convention in some genres, such as the medieval visio or dream vision, that the poetic speaker is a dull, imperceptive caricature of the author. See also authorial voice and dream vision, above.
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