BUT ENOUGH ABOUT ME: POEMS WITHOUT PERSONAS

Jan Schreiber

O wad some Power the giftie gie us

To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An’ foolish notion.
– Robert Burns

Sara Teasdale, Vachel Lindsay, Hart Crane, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, Richard Brauti-
gan – diverse as these writers were, they all died by their own hand.1 In the general American population
the suicide rate is approximately 13 in 100,000. If there were 50,000 poets of major reputation in the
country during the decades when these people lived and died, we might say their suicides did not exceed
the norm; but there were not. Therefore we must conclude that at some point in our history suicide be-
came an occupational hazard of the poetic vocation. To be sure, there were extenuating circumstances:
alcoholism, abusive childhoods, disappointments in love and betrayal by loved ones. But these misfor-
tunes occur in many other lives as well. It is reasonable to ask if there is something in the act of writing
poetry – or the disposition to write it – that puts the writer in particular danger. The ancient Chinese evi-
dently thought so. Don Paterson gives us a version of a short poem by Li Po about a colleague:

I found him wandering on the hill

one hot blue afternoon.
He looked as skinny as a nail,
as pale-skinned as the moon;

below the broad shade of his hat

his face was cut with rain.
Dear God, poor Du Fu, I thought:
It’s the poetry again.
(“The Poetry”)

So what is it about “the poetry” – and particularly about the poetry of the twentieth century – that en-
dangers its practitioners the way the song “Gloomy Sunday” reputedly endangered all who heard it?2 A
definitive answer to that question may never be found, but if we’re alert we can see poets here and there
casting about for a protective talisman. Louise Bogan, who knew something about seasons in hell, having
spent several extended periods in psychiatric hospitals recovering from breakdowns, saw that it was
somehow important that a writer remain separate from his writing. She wrote in “To an Artist, to Take
Heart”:

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 Slipping in blood, by his own hand, through pride,
Hamlet, Othello, Coriolanus fall.
Upon his bed, however, Shakespeare died,
Having endured them all.

She was not often heeded. John Berryman, who spent years maintaining to everyone who asked that
the Henry of the Dream Songs was not himself, knew also that Henry was his stand-in. In a telling mo-
ment in his Paris Review interview, he stumbled in his attempt to keep his real and his fictional selves
separate:

Berryman: It did not occur to me to have a dialogue between them—to insert bodily Henry into
the poem . . . Me, to insert me, in my own person, John Berryman, I, into the poem . . .
Interviewer: Was that a Freudian slip?
Berryman: I don't know. Probably.3

Later in the same interview, talking of the composition of Love & Fame, he seemed to give up on the as-
piration to write objectively: “[T]he subject on which I am a real authority is me, so I wiped out all the
disguises and went to work.”
Leaving aside the question whether one is ever a real authority on oneself (see this paper’s epigraph),
a poet might ponder whether it is possible to become too obsessed with his or her own responses to the
slings and arrows that pelt us all. That is not a dubiety foremost in every poet’s mind; nevertheless some
are (or appear to be) endowed with a certain reticence that steers them away from both confession and
self-obsession. Such poets often make strenuous efforts to avoid tapping too quickly into the wellsprings
of their own feelings. They may even evince a reflexive suspicion of first-person grammatical forms, the
mode of discourse so natural to the lyric poet as to seem all but unavoidable.
There are of course many ways to write a poem in the first person while still guarding against public
exposure. One can adopt a straightforward reportorial style, as if relating one’s own perceptions as they
might be seen by somebody else. One can pretend to be somebody else, with an eccentric background and
a clearly limited or biased view of the world. One can begin a narrative in the first person but continue in
the third, as if a trusted witness were narrating only objective facts. Or one can adopt a naïve tone, creat-
ing a persona who seems more innocent or unaware than the poet herself. (“What’s wrong about self-pity
anyway?” asks Bishop’s Robinson Crusoe.4)
All these devices are ways of bringing color, which is to say feeling, into a poem. They work well
because readers quickly infer the emotional force behind a first-person statement, even one that purports
not to be the poet’s own. It’s a faculty we all need to function in a social world. But a poet who distrusts
the ease of thus enlisting the reader as an emotional ally, who wants to ensure that no unjustified or too

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readily intuited feeling can creep into a poem, may choose to rule out first-person narrative altogether and
attempt to generate any and all sympathies only through the careful assembly and declamation of artfully
chosen facts. Such an approach – employing what we might call scrupulous objectivity – poses special
challenges for the writer. I mean to explore several varieties of this cultivated neutrality here.

No Ideas But in Things

If the poem deals with inanimate matter, its human meaning must be communicated without an ostensible
narrator to react to it. One way to do that is through tone. Kay Ryan, for example, generally avoids creat-
ing an identifiable persona but still writes in a voice that might belong to a friend or neighbor to comment
and direct our attention to her subject’s human relevance:

A Plain Ordinary Steel Needle Can Float on Pure Water

—Ripley’s Believe It or Not

Who hasn’t seen

a plain ordinary
steel needle float serene
on water as if lying on a pillow?
The water cuddles up like Jell-O.
It’s a treat to see water
so rubbery, a needle
so peaceful, the point encased
in the tenderest dimple.
It seems so simple
when things or people
have modified each other’s qualities
somewhat;
we almost forget the oddity
of that.

There’s a peculiar kind of alchemy afoot in this poem. The authorial voice, seemingly a fount of common
sense, makes an unwarranted inference in order to draw a human moral from the observed facts. The ob-
jects in question – needle and water – have not modified each other’s qualities but have merely taken ad-
vantage of one of water’s less apparent features, its surface tension, to produce a counter-intuitive specta-
cle. By infusing her narration with a tone of quiet conviction and wry astonishment, the poet carries off
her subtle deception, and in the process makes a keen point about human psychology, without need for a
distinct narrative persona.

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 If the subject is animate, non-human nature, the writer can seek to avoid lending it human-like quali-
ties that would risk sentimentalizing it. Yet there must be an emotional connection, and the human resem-
blance cannot be entirely suppressed. Sometimes it is suggested quite indirectly. Consider Emily Dickin-
son’s well known poem “Farther in Summer Than the Birds.” Written strictly in the third person, the po-
em relies on statements that purport to describe a scene in nature through metaphor.

Farther in summer than the birds,

Pathetic from the grass,
A minor nation celebrates
Its unobtrusive mass.

No ordinance is seen,
So gradual the grace,
A pensive custom it becomes,
Enlarging loneliness.

Antiquest felt at noon

When August, burning low,
Calls forth this spectral canticle,
Repose to typify.

Remit as yet no grace,

No furrow on the glow,
Yet a druidic difference
Enhances nature now.

We infer that the chirping or buzzing of insects – probably cicadas or crickets – is being likened to a
human ritual. The poem offers the reader barely enough concrete detail to determine what is happening,
and much of that detail is provided only at a metaphorical level: nation, mass, ordinance, grace, custom,
canticle. The adjectives lend no more specificity, but qualify the feeling the poet wants to convey: pathet-
ic, minor, unobtrusive, pensive, spectral, druidic. In short, because the poem is seeking to explain why a
natural phenomenon can evoke such strong feeling, Dickinson relies heavily on quasi-religious metaphor
and on adjectives that would likely not be found in the prose of an entomologist. In doing so she scants
the obligation to help readers see or hear what she is talking about (in fact the physical details of her sub-
ject appear not to interest her greatly), but compensates by creating a lush and memorable emotional aura.
We have, it would seem, much to learn from the insect world. Employing a similar strategy in “How
to Paint a Water Lily,” Ted Hughes declines to engage personally with his subject, instead adopting the

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tone of a guidebook or instruction manual to describe essentially human matters in terms of the inhuman
other:

First observe the air’s dragonfly

That eats meat, that bullets by
Or stands in space to take aim;
Others as dangerous comb the hum
Under the trees. There are battle-shouts
And death-cries everywhere hereabouts
But inaudible, so the eyes praise
To see the colours of these flies
Rainbow their arcs, spark, or settle
Cooling like beads of molten metal
Through the spectrum.

The menace so often observed in Hughes’s poems is palpable here. What was a religious ritual in Dickin-
son becomes a microcosmic war here, contributing to the unnerving conclusion that beauty and terror in
life are at some deep level inseparable.
By contrast, here’s a rather more benign poem by Philip Larkin, called “Pigeons”:

On shallow slates the pigeons shift together,

Backing against a thin rain from the west
Blown across each sunk head and settled feather.
Huddling round the warm stack suits them best,
Till winter daylight weakens, and they grow
Hardly defined against the brickwork. Soon,
Light from a small intense lopsided moon
Shows them, black as their shadows, sleeping so.

The poem is part of an on-going project discernible in Larkin’s work: to write straightforward description
without the insertion of an ostensible sensibility conferred by a persona, while yet allowing mood, per-
spective, and feeling to emerge as it were from the details alone. It is a dignified poem that successfully
evokes feelings of somber pity for weak creatures in an indifferent landscape, even while it eschews both
the implied violence of Hughes’s world and the mystical associations Dickinson conjures with her highly
allusive metaphorical language.
If the subject is the interactions among people, the writer becomes a dramatist who deals with the
struggles of others – a rewarding but challenging role to accomplish in the compass of a brief poem. Most
of Robert Frost’s efforts in this form approach the length of a prose short story. To achieve condensation
the poet must generalize. In “The Darkness and the Light Are Both Alike to Thee,” Anthony Hecht views

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his human subjects from a great distance, not mentioning them until halfway through the poem. The third-
person narration makes human beings seem secondary to the points of light that outlast the darkness but
fade in daylight. Thus the true emotional focus of the poem is treated almost as an afterthought.

Distantly lights go on.

Scattered like fallen sparks
Bedded in peat, they seem
Set in the plushest darks
Until a timid gleam
Of matins turns them wan,

Like the elderly and frail

Who’ve lasted through the night,
Cold brows and silent lips,
For whom the rising light
Entails their own eclipse,
Brightening as they fail.

Instead of pity for non-human creatures with whose physical needs we can empathize, we are asked here
to pity frail human beings at the end of life, who recognize in the ascendant morning their own extin-
guishment. The notion that “life goes on” is small comfort to those for whom it does not. By locating a
large theme in an ordinary diurnal event, Hecht is able to write movingly and impersonally at the same
time.

Retreat from the Concrete

Another way out of the cage of the first person, a way rarely explored in our day, is through pure abstrac-
tion: the statement and defense in verse of a philosophical position – often one with strong moral implica-
tions – that the poet associates not with himself personally but with mankind in general. Such statements
were frequent among Elizabethan writers. In his “Chorus Sacerdotum,” Fulke Greville lamented,

Is it the mark, or majesty of power

To make offences that it may forgive?
Nature herself, doth her own self deflower,
To hate those errors she herself doth give.

And Shakespeare treated one aspect of nature’s ambiguous generosity in highly stylized rhetoric in Son-
net 129: “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame / Is lust in action ...”
But rare are the twentieth-century poets who have followed suit. T. S. Eliot stated abstract truths some
might consider obvious in the opening lines of “Burnt Norton”:

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 Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.

Making such arguments, convincing or otherwise, used to be one of the things poems could do. Exten-
sions of this way of writing in abstractions were occasionally tried out in later decades, notably by some
students of Yvor Winters. Thom Gunn, for example, employs the abstract style occasionally, as in his po-
em “Berlin in Ruins” in which he meditates on the Anhalter Bahnhof, now a mere shell of the once mas-
sive building:

The mind does not rest without peril

among the tarnished blades of laurel:

it may cut on them, it may fester

– until it throbs with a revived fear
of the dark hysteric conqueror

returning from France in triumph as

the hectic that overtakes process,
beneath a silk tent of swastikas.

And fever may descend on the brow

like the high circlet, in whose shadow
the mind awakes, bathed in poison now;

or, harder and sharper than bronze, still

supporting the insupportable,
it may survive its own stiff laurel.

Characteristics of this style are phrases like “the mind,” “the brow,” and unidiomatic abstractions like
“the hectic that overtakes process.” Readers may be able to puzzle out meaning and even derive a sense of
moral discomfort from a poem of this kind, but the effort takes patience and a willingness to give the po-
em the benefit of the doubt. Gunn’s natural disposition lay elsewhere, and he soon left this style behind.
As did most of his contemporaries. We have made a great collective shift toward the dramatic and the
immediate and have all but abandoned abstract statement except in the context of a clearly recognizable

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dramatic setting. This may be a gain, but it is more likely a sign of the current Zeitgeist and destined to
change once again. In our present climate, at least one poet, Louise Glück, offers in “The Winged Horse”
a tongue-in-cheek confession to a certain nostalgia for a once respectable poetic style:

Here is my horse Abstraction,

silver-white, color of the page,
of the unwritten.

Come, Abstraction,
by Will out of Demonic Ambition:
carry me lightly into the regions of the immortal.

I am weary of my other mount,

by Instinct out of Reality,
color of dust, of disappointment,
notwithstanding
the saddle that went with him
and the bronze spurs, the bit
of indestructible metal.

I am weary of the world’s gifts, the world’s

stipulated limits.

And I am weary of being opposed

and weary of being constantly contradicted by the material, as by
a massive wall where all I say can be
checked up on.

Then come, Abstraction,

take me where you have taken so many others,
far from here, to the void, the star pasture.

Bear me quickly,
Dream out of Blind Hope.

Glück, of course, does establish a persona in this poem, one that operates behind a screen of irony that is
fully consistent with the wry self-critical and skeptical stance she adopts even in the midst of her most
intense self-analysis. That too is a form of protective firewall.

Myth

Glück’s horse, Abstraction, is modeled on mythical horses such as Pegasus, that possess supernatural
powers, and in that respect her poem points to another ancient objectifying technique, the narrative of

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classical myth. It is a technique that few poets use today, likely both because it seems somewhat contrived
and because familiarity with ancient myth can no longer be assumed even in a literate audience. Never-
theless it is an effective way to present emotionally complex and sometimes wrenching material without
directly implicating the poet herself. Here, for example, is “Actaeon” by A. E. Stallings:

The hounds, you know them all by name.

You fostered them from purblind whelps
At their dam’s teats, and you have come
To know the music of their yelps:

High-strung Anthee, the brindled bitch,

The blue-tick coated Philomel,
And freckled Chloe, who would fetch
A pretty price if you would sell—

All fleet of foot, and swift to scent,

Inexorable once on the track,
Like angry words you might have meant,
But do not mean, and can’t take back.

There was a time when you would brag

How they would bay and rend apart
The hopeless belling from a stag.
You falter now for the foundered hart.

Desires you nursed of a winter night—

Did you know then why you bred them—
Whose needling milk-teeth used to bite
The master’s hand that leashed and fed them?

To comprehend the poem we are required to know at least the outlines of the myth of Actaeon, the
hunter who came across the naked Artemis bathing, and for his trespass was turned into a stag that was
then set upon by his own dogs, who tore him limb from limb. The poem lavishes what seems at first like
inordinate detail on the hounds, and not so much on Actaeon himself, who is addressed in the second per-
son, like an intimate, or perhaps a self. But then some linguistic sleight of hand changes our perspective.
The “hart,” a synonym for “stag,” might be a pun. And in the last stanza the dogs have become desires,
nursed over time and finally capable of consuming their possessor. They are, we learned a few lines back,
like angry words that, once turned loose, cannot be recanted. Without directly implicating its author, or
any other living soul, the poem stands as a cautionary tale of destructive emotions given too free rein.

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Beyond Words

And then there is metaphor – specifically the symbolic treatment of the poet’s own problems and dilem-
mas as though they concerned someone else altogether, someone who lived a far different life from one’s
own. In “Roman Fountain,” Louise Bogan poses as merely an observer, an “I” who gets the poem started,
then stands back and lets the water gush:

Up from the bronze I saw

Water without a flaw
Rush to its rest in air,
Reach to its rest, and fall.

Bronze of the blackest shade,

An element man-made,
Shaping upright the bare
Clear gouts of water in air.

O, as with arm and hammer,

Still it is good to strive
To beat out the image whole,
To echo the shout and stammer
When full-gushed waters, alive,
Strike on the fountain’s bowl
After the air of summer.

Apart from the superb description of the up-rushing water, the point of the poem resides in the last seven
lines, which urge the craftsman to “beat out the image whole” in imitation of the fountain so brilliantly
evoked. In somewhat the same way, Derek Walcott in “Night Fishing” obliquely discusses the problem
of writing poetry without ever mentioning himself or even, specifically, poetry:

Line, trawl for each word

with the homesick toss
of a black pirogue anchored
in stuttering phosphorus.

The crab-fishers’ torches

keep to the surf’s crooked line,
and a cloud’s page scorches
with a smell of kerosene.

Thorny stars halo

the sybil’s black cry:

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 “Apotherein thelo
I am longing to die.”

But, line, live in the sounds

that ignorant shallows use;
then throw the silvery nouns
to open-mouthed canoes.

Readers familiar with Wolcott’s work will recognize here his tendency to treat the entire world as a
book in which poems can be read and written. The line between the word and the world is as thin as the
letter “l” and as liquid. For our purposes the poem illustrates a way of discussing a matter of central con-
cern to the poet while maintaining an ostensible focus on fishing – the livelihood of Wolcott’s compatri-
ots and the activity most evocative of life on his native islands.
To forestall any objections, let me make it clear that I do not believe a poet must abandon any use of a
persona in order to write objectively, to escape the tyranny of the self. There are many forms of disguise,
many masks that can be highly effective and endlessly entertaining. But writing in an ostensibly neutral
voice, not attributable to anyone in particular, is challenging for a poet who wishes, while doing so, to
communicate strong feeling and a sense of immediacy. It is one more self-imposed restriction but one
that, brought off successfully, allows the poem a kind of lapidary grandeur that sets it apart from its more
importunate fellows.
More than that, it grants the poet (or compels him to achieve) a certain distance from his own person-
ality, with its neuroses and anxieties of the kind Philip Larkin so memorably conveyed, in the first person,
in “Aubade.” Fictional though that distance may be, it still offers a different sort of lens – and a wide-
angle one at that – through which to view his tumultuous times and his equally tumultuous self. Perhaps
we should offer the last word, or words, to W.H. Auden, who strove all his life for this kind of objectivity.
He came close to it in “Look, Stranger” :

Far off like floating seeds the ships

Diverge on urgent voluntary errands;
And the full view
Indeed may enter
And move in memory as now these clouds do,
That pass the harbour mirror
And all the summer through the water saunter.

Like many introspective people, certain poets search for an angle of vision offering an objective view
of experience. In that search they encounter, I believe, an especially narrow gate to pass through because
they traffic, by profession, in those moments when the nerves are most on edge, when perceptions and

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feelings are keenest. The search has its rewards, but also its pangs of renunciation. Auden left a memora-
ble record of his struggle in a first-person poem, “The More Loving One”:

Were all the stars to disappear or die,

I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

NOTES

1
So, perhaps, did Randall Jarrell, killed by an automobile on the highway during a period of profound depression.
2
In the film of the same name, those who hear the song often commit suicide, as does its composer.
3
John Berryman, Paris Review interview (Winter 1972), “The Art of Poetry,” no. 16.
4
Elizabeth Bishop, “Crusoe in England.”

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