Voice, Tone, Speaker

What is voice? How do writers establish voice on the page?

The Road Not Taken 

BY ROBERT FROST

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Word choice/ vocabulary AND word order/ syntax

Propel, propel, propel your craft

placidly down the liquid solution

ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically

existence is but an illusion.

Come up with a range of different words that mean “intelligent.”

How different are the connotations/ atmosphere of each word?

Word choices can help establish a voice and a tone clearly on the page.

To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.

--Joan Didion

• While we were walking, we ran into Janet.
• We ran into Janet while we were walking.
• Janet: we ran into her while we were walking.
• We were walking when we ran into Janet.
• While walking we were, into Janet we ran.

How do these different terms help us understand the voice in a poem?

Billy Collins:

You, quote, find your voice, unquote, when you are able to invent this one character who resembles you, obviously, and probably is morelike you than anyone else on earth, but is not the equivalent to you.

Sharon Olds:

It doesn't feel personal. It feels like art--a made thing--the "I" in it not myself anymore, but, I'd hope, some pronoun that a reader or hearer could slip into.

Foster: A poem is not a true document but rather an imaginative utterance. And the imaginative part extends to teh personage who utters it.

Frost: These poems are written in parable so the wrong people won't understand, and so get saved.

Foster: Almost all his most memorable lines don't say what those quoting them think they do.

How do these ideas destabilize the way we read a poem? What questions do we need to ask about a poem's voice, "truth," and meaning as we read?

Foster: There is always some daylight between the speaker of a poem and this ghostly stand-in, the implied author.

Wordsworth's proclamation: poetry is "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling" and "emotion recollected in tranquility"

The Beats and Confessional poets

Point of View

Pronouns: Is the poem's speaker first person, second person, or third person?

Singular or plural?

Verbs: Past tense or present tense?

Why does it matter?

Find one poem written in first person.

Find one written in third person.

Find one where the speaker is singular and one where the speaker is plural.

Find one poem in past tense and one in present.

What difference do these choices seem to make?

Irony: The difference between what's expected or stated and what actually happens or is meant.

Foster: What we mean by irony here is that gap between what a poet knows or thinks and what he or she allows the poem to say.

(Situational: a person's position or our expectations are reversed or fulfilled in an unexpected way)

(Dramatic: The character's knowledge and expectations are different from the audience/reader's.)

• Metaphor: A comparison that isn't explicitly stated. (The droppings of last year's horses/ Blaze up into golden stones."
• Simile: A comparison that's explicitly stated, often with like/as. ("Their women cluck like starved pullets')
• Symbol: a person, place, thing, or event that figuratively represents or stands in for something else. Start with the literal first, though!
• Imagery/Image
• Line, stanza
• Rhyme, half rhyme
• Meter (rhythm)

Grappling: Take a look at your chosen poem. Use some of the tools we've learned so far to grapple with its ideas.

Start with images--the concrete. What senses are present? What ideas, emotions, atmosphere do the images imply?

Who is the speaker? What's he/she like? How would you describe the voice of the poem?

How do diction and syntax (kinds of words and sentence structure) help create this speaker/persona/ narrator? What is the poem's attitude toward the subject? What's the speaker's attitude toward themselves?

How does the poem's appearance/line breaks help create a voice on the page? Are lines enjambed or end-stopped? How else do line breaks, stanzas, and spacing on the page contribute to the way you read the poem?

What sounds are present? Is there a regular rhythm? Are there rhymes? Alliteration, assonance, or consonance?

Look for other patterns--Do you see any repetition of words or ideas? Do you see any progression in the poem (spatial, emotional, logical, etc.)?

Diction

Syntax

Voice

Voice, Tone, Speaker

Other Helpful Terms

Frost

Gwendolyn Brooks

Kearney

Speaker, Persona, Implied Author

Hughes

cummings

Whitman

Espada

Clifton

Billy Collins

Grappling: Take a look at some of the different poems on the handout. Use some of the tools we've learned so far to grapple with their ideas.

• Start with images--the concrete. What ideas, emotions, atmosphere do the images imply?
• Who is the speaker? What's he/she like? How would you describe the voice of the poem?
• How do diction and syntax (kinds of words and sentence structure) help create this speaker/persona/ narrator?
• How does the poem's appearance/line breaks help create a voice on the page?
• What is the poem's attitude toward the subject? What's the speaker's attitude toward themselves?

Safia Elhillo: How to Say

https://poets.org/poem/how-say

What about line breaks and the poem's appearance on the page?