What makes a poet? What are the origins of poetic voice? These questions are raised in the ‘Lyric’ section of the print edition of The Poetry Toolkit, which I recommend you read first, but the question of ‘who is speaking’ in a poem is an especially rich area for poetry’s engagement with theory. William Wordsworth’s enormously influential suggestion that ‘all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ (p. 562), which, he elaborates, are feelings ‘modified and directed by our thoughts’ (ibid.), epitomizes a theory of poetry that is profoundly attached to expression. Poetry may stand as an expression of feeling and thought – it is ‘evidence’ of emotion – and/or it might be a way of expressing feelings and thoughts (with emphasis subtly shifting between the poem itself and poetry as process). Either way, Wordsworth’s formulation suggests poetic presence – someone is experiencing feelings that find their way into poems. This would seem to be self-evident – a person must exist to generate the poem – but even this proposition has been richly interrogated by theorists of language, culture, and reading. Wordsworth’s further suggestion that a poet is ‘a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind’ (p. 567) generates yet more debate: first, what relationship does poetry have to a ‘feeling body’ – i.e. how is a poem an expression of feeling? And second, are their conditions in place that determine who that body might be? 

Thinking of the mechanics of expression, some of poetry’s ‘origin stories’ complicate from the outset Wordsworth’s theory that poetry is produced by feelings modified by thoughts, suggesting conscious presence. The earliest recorded English poem is ‘Cædmon’s Hymn’, documented by Bede in the eighth century. Cædmon is said to have been a very shy cowherd who always avoided the obligation to sing or recite poetry in public – that is, until one night he had a vision in a dream. When he awoke, he remembered the song he had sung while dreaming and this became the song he then performed in public to great acclaim. So poetry emerges as unconsciously channeled beauty, the poet even reluctant to receive, as Denise Levertov puts it in her 1987 poem, ‘that hand of fire’ that ‘pulled my voice | into the ring of the dance’ (ll. 32-33). In Classical Greek history, Sappho too is an ambivalent figure (see ‘Lyric’ in The Poetry Toolkit) – one whose fragmented writerly remains suggest great feeling, but whose personhood is occluded, generating layers of (re)constructed narratives rather than a stable body ‘behind’ the verse. Poetic voice may be theorized in terms of clarity, directness and presence, but its history – and especially its relationship to print culture – complicates this profoundly and creatively. Who we ‘see’ or ‘hear’ behind, in or through the poem is culturally inflected: poetic voice might be a clarion call, but it might also be a performance, a construction, or an inference: a presence we deduce from poetic writing. Theorists of lyric in particular – such as Susan Stewart, Yopie Prins, Virginia Jackson, and Jonathan Culler – track poetry’s relationship to theories of expression, of identity, and cultural production in literary terms. 

But these questions also open up the territory of identity more broadly; if poetry has been historically associated both with expression and with performance, then it becomes a potent site for considering theories of performativity, most prominently by Judith Butler (and those who have extended or complicated her theories). Yet discussion can go further again: poetry’s relationship with human expression also makes for a compelling ‘test case’ for theories that have emerged in response to climate crisis, ‘ecological thinking’ and human/non-human relations, theories that put identity into question entirely. What kind of reading of a poem can ‘post-humanism’ offer, for example? What kind of lyric poetry emerges when human/non-human relations are radically reconceived? In such conditions, whose (or what) consciousness or agency is driving the poem? Here poetry’s association with thinking that goes beyond traditionally conceived, human-centred, rational thought releases remarkable potential for our relationship with all occupants of the Earth. 

And yet poetry is also something that individuals or groups undertake to say things, often in the teeth of prevailing opinion; it may be human-centred, but it is politically compelling. In this way, poetry is exposed to theories of opportunity, culture, and privilege – and the politics of change. Langston Hughes, writing in 1920s America, regretted how for many, including his fellow black writers, that poet figure evoked in Wordsworth’s terms is assumed to be white (‘And so the word white comes to be unconsciously a symbol of all virtues’, p. 1193), which then threatens black culture’s place within the terms of value. Hughes calls attention to this assumption and compels black poets to look to their own culture for ‘a great field of unused material ready for [their] art’ (ibid.). Hughes’ theories of what ‘counts’ as a poet, and as poetry, thus becomes political – and suggests the need for similar conversations around other races, class, gender, and organized politics. (For more on these aspects, see ‘cultural studies’ in the ‘Reader, Audience’ think piece.) This accounts for the nuance that theorists have added to the kinds of expressive theories that Wordsworth’s formulation suggests – rather than asking plainly, ‘what is this poet expressing?’, such theorists ask, ‘how does this poet express feeling? What vocabularies do they draw on?, what areas of experience are left out of recognized expression?’. Rather than assuming that expression is straight forward and liberating, they ask, ‘what strategies does this poet employ to be heard?, what or who is not heard?’. The relationship between poetry and expression cannot be assumed in such discussions; some theorists emphasize poetry’s capacity to express diverse experiences, others draw attention to how poetic tradition might actually have restricted poetry’s expressive potential. 

This kind of interrogation of the status of ‘poet’ (the origin of expressed feeling), however, still confirms poetry’s particular relationship with individual expression and identity: it is important who speaks, and how, because that speaking has significance. This is because poetry stands out in cultural terms for its potential to express complicated, intimate feelings and emotion. This is the premise of ‘Confessional poetry’, a loosely-grouped movement in mid-twentieth century America that produced poetry regarded especially for its focus on intense, individual mental states and suggested trauma – see Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, W. D. Snodgrass – but it is crucial to generations of writers who have used poetry to reach into emotion, and readers who have read poetry for catharsis, succour, or therapy.  In this sense, poetry is available to the wealth of theory that has been devised to understand psychological states ranging from distress to joy. In the ‘Language’ think piece I touch on poetry and psychoanalytic theory, but in terms of expression, poetry – including poetry not overtly focused on difficult emotions or trauma, but simply thoughts and feelings – might be fruitfully approached from the perspective of the ‘affective turn’ (‘affect’ being about feelings, and in related ways, emotion) in critical theory of the last couple of decades. This critical pathway has sought to bring aesthetic theory (theories relating to beauty, especially in art, sculpture, and poetry) together with neuroscience (investigating the scientific and physiological status of emotion) and/or phenomenology (the structures of consciousness). This is an emerging, absorbing field, and one to which poetry might contribute both as ‘evidence’ (the poem as a structure to be analysed in terms of affect theory) and/or as ‘process’ (poetry as therapeutic tool, or as a way of proceeding that eludes conventional, rational explanation, or as a mode uniquely ‘in tune’ with physiology). 

Strikingly anticipating some of the terms of the ‘affective turn’, whilst also calling back to Plato’s feeling that poetry jangles the nerves, Adrienne Rich writes in ‘Someone is Writing a Poem’, that ‘all this has to travel from the nervous system of the poet, preverbal, to the nervous system of the one who listens, who reads, the active participant without whom the poem is never finished’. Rich’s formulation intimates that it is language that will carry ‘all this’ along, seemingly like a freight train; yet Rich’s essay knows that this is a disruptive, creative, generative vehicle. See the ‘Language’ and ‘Reader, Audience’ think pieces in the accompanying tabs for more on poetry, specifically, the language it takes and the reader it reaches.