I'm posting this to keep it foremost in my thinking as I am going to need to sort out where I am going to go with this. I may invite some conversation with other poets on the subject, and consider a representative sample of poems which speak to the idea of "I" in poetry.


The notion that poets can-and should-speak personally through their poems raises radical notions about the structures of memory and truth and the nature of “I”. Poetry is much more than words and objective cognitive processes it is also lyrical, metaphorical, compositional and resists literal measurements of ‘truth’. It is precisely these qualities that allow poetry to speak honestly even if not literally truthfully; and precisely this possibility, which contributes to the conundrum about the validity of the poetic “I”.

Prior to the 1950-60’s, literary convention supported an objective and impersonal sort of poetry, which was to be an escape from personality and emotion [TS Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," (1919)] Movements such as the Beat Movement and Confessional poetry proposed a different sort of poetic ‘truth’ telling that did not gain easy acceptance. This was poetry written from the perspective of “I” and was assumed to be autobiographical. Such poetry has been criticized as inferior, gratuitous, sloppy and self-indulgent. Ironically, it has also been interpreted as literally ‘true’.

In this paper I propose to explore the use of “I” as a poetic convention, which allows for the manipulation of memory and subjective positioning to ‘tell truths’. I will use my own work as well as that of other selected poets to explore the process of making and ascribing of ‘meaning’ to poetry and to explore the relative value of truth in poetry.