The You and I of Poetry

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table

  *

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;

I'll only stop to rake the leaves away

(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):

I sha'n't be gone long.—You come too.

I'm going out to fetch the little calf

That's standing by the mother. It's so young,

It totters when she licks it with her tongue.

I sha'n't be gone long.—You come too.

  *

I'm Nobody! Who are you? 

Are you – Nobody – too? 

Then there's a pair of us!

Don’t tell! they'd advertise – you know! 

How dreary to be Somebody

How public – like a Frog –

To tell your name – the livelong June–

To an admiring Bog!

All my favorite poems have a You and an I—although they don’t always use those pronouns explicitly, as do Eliot, Frost, and Dickinson in favorites quoted above. In the simplest instance the I is what we call THE POET—a wise, perceptive, linguistically brilliant, trustworthy speaker such as Keats in his Odes or Shakespeare in many of his sonnets. Whatever the subject, the Poet’s I is speaking to You, the reader or listener. Poetry is the most intimate of the verbal arts, and it is largely the You and I dynamic that makes it so. When it is working, it generates what might be called the electricity, or current of the poem.

You and I, however, can get complex. In the persona poem the speaker is not the poet, but a fictional character—the religious hypocrite in Burns’ “Holy Willie’s Prayer” or the murderous Duke in Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” or the defeated, self-deprecating, but honest and somewhat sympathetic sad-sack in Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

Of course, the poet’s I is still there, in the wings, presenting Holy Willie, the evil Duke, or Prufrock to You, the reader. In a persona poem there’s a secret compact between the reader and the poet. Together, we observe, listen to, and silently agree on our assessment pro or con of the speaker.

Prufrock’s “Let us go then, you and I” seems to be directed solely to us, but we soon realize that there’s another You in the poem: that Prufrock is talking to his alter ego or imaginary friend. Still, as we walk with him through London streets and drawing rooms we feel that he is speaking to us as well.

In Robert Frost’s “The Pasture,” Spring has sprung. A farmer (probably standing in the doorway) is inviting someone (probably his wife) to explore the farm with him. Because “The Pasture” is the first poem we encounter in Frost’s Collected Poems we sense that his “You come too” includes us, as well. We are being invited to explore and enjoy Frost’s poetry.

In both cases the speaker’s tone is affectionate and considerate. “I sha'n't be gone long” is the farmer’s way of assuring his busy wife that their jaunt will not take up too much of her time. For us, it’s our poet’s metaphorical way of assuring readers that his poetry will only take the time needed to entertain and enlighten, as we wait to watch the spring’s water clear and enjoy the calf, tottering by its mother.

Emily Dickinson’s “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” has an admission requirement. Are you offended, disgusted, bored, and a wee bit amused by the antics of self -promoting egotists? If so, you and Emily can become best friends, contemplating with horror and delight those who, “public like a Frog” tell their names “the livelong June— / to an admiring bog.”

You needn’t be a shut-in to accept the identity Emily has created for you. You may be an extrovert, out and about in the world, but you can still be offended by pompous, phony, self-promoting individuals and stand with the poet in rejecting their behavior.

Wallace Stevens says that the poet’s goal is “to confer his identity upon the reader.” We confer positive things—awards, honors titles, rights—upon deserving parties. If the poet is offering us something akin to Jonathan Swift’s “sweetness and light” the fusion between poet and reader will easily take
place.

Keep in mind that when a poet asks you to go along with his or her I, you can put the book down and say, “Hell no! I won’t go!” Walt Whitman introduces himself to readers with a rather imperious “I celebrate myself and sing myself / And what I assume you shall assume.” In my satiric poem “Crazy Dave Talks With the Poets,” I answer: “Not so fast, Walter! We barely know each other and already you’re asking me to sign a prenup?”

To be fair to Walt, he also says that readers should not feel inferior to poets, assuring us that “We are no better than you. You are not an iota less. What we enclose you enclose, what we enjoy you may enjoy.” Whether you stick with a poem or bail out after three or four or ten lines depends on whether or not you are comfortable with the You that the poem’s I expects you to become.

Poets often condense their I and You into a We or Us. It’s a way of conferring the poet’s identity upon the reader by association. Though Prufrock uses “I” 40 times in his love song, he shifts to We and Us in his final lines: “We have lingered in the chambers of the sea / By sea girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown. / Till human voices wake us and we drown.”  Eliot and Prufrock, Prufrock and his alter ego, Prufrock and You, Eliot and You have all lingered together in a mesmerizing, dreamlike world. Though Prufrock suggests that all of us will wake (or in his word “drown”) into reality, fictional entities cannot do so. Only you, the reader, are real; only you can put the poem down at its end, leave its imagined plane, and return to the world informed or transformed by your poetic experience.

The chemistry between writer and reader via the You and I of poetry is infinitely variable. In another favorite poem, Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” the poet is looking at a fragmentary statue of the god. Rilke’s first line begins “We cannot know his legendary head” to let you know that you are standing beside the poet in a gallery or museum. You both feel that the missing, unseen parts of the statue—its “eyes like ripening fruit” and “loins where procreation flared”—are still having a powerful effect. “For here,” the poet says, “there is no place that does not see you.” In what has become one of the most famous lines in poetry, the I of the poet turns to You, the Reader, and throws down a gauntlet, the challenge that perfect works of art by their nature inspire: You must change your life.

In another favorite poem of mine, “The Niagara River,” Kay Ryan needs to include not just You in her We, but every human being on the planet. Sailing down the Niagara river is Ryan’s metaphor for life’s journey through time and space and humankind’s inability to truly grasp the fact that we are mortal and inevitably headed for a Fall. “We do know, we do know this is the Niagara
River,” she concludes, “but it is hard to remember what that means.”

But how about the naysayer, the poet who cries, “I don’t care about the reader!” True, we do write for ourselves, but that doesn’t mean that only our I remains. Writing is a process wherein poets, like the great jazz pianist Bill Evans, have conversations with themselves. As I write my poem, my You reads it and is pleased or displeased, entertained or annoyed by what my I is saying.

Poets who put egotism aside and listen when their You is not satisfied with a word or line or simile or metaphor may not end up with a great poem, but it will be a more perfect one. It’s only when not even a syllable makes the poet’s You wince that the poem is ready to encounter readers, relying on more than Blanche DuBois’ “the kindness of strangers.”

True poetic revolutions are rare, and we are not always fortunate to have one come along in our lifetime. They always involve a profound change in the nature of the You and I of Poetry. The Romantics had sensibilities fundamentally different from their Neo-classical predecessors. The Modernists were dealt a shattered post-World War I reality that their Victorian predecessors didn’t speak to. In different ways, the Romantics and Modernists transformed their I’s and You’s to connect with a new generation of readers, who felt that poetry was suddenly speaking to them once again.

In the middle of the last century, poets unfulfilled by the biographically reticent work of the Modernists revolutionized the You and I of Poetry. The Beats and the Confessionals forged a new “I,” eagerly sharing intimate, disturbing, personal experiences that would have been unthinkable for Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, or Wallace Stevens to make public.

Readers felt honored to be Robert Lowell’s confidant, to listen sympathetically as he explored his troubled family lineage in “Life Studies” and his chaotic marital problems in his sonnets. In Sylvia Plath’s Ariel poems, her I manages to create a You willing to suspend judgment and extend sympathy while experiencing the darkest traumas of her suicidal nature that ultimately ended her life.

In Howl, Alan Ginsberg created an encyclopedic portrait of an economically and spiritually alienated generation. Suddenly millions of young men and women felt that a poet was speaking to them—that they had a place, if not in reality, in poetic fiction. Electricity was flowing through the You and I lifeline once again.

We have not had a seismic poetic revolution since the 1950’s. We’ve had post -modernism, neo-formalism, new narrative poetry, concrete poetry, language poetry, slam poetry, and other limited movements, each capturing a sliver of potential poetry lovers. Today, too many poems are written by specialized I’s for specialized You’s, with diminishing returns regarding their market share of readers.

If another seismic poetry revolution is to happen it will involve yet another dramatic change in the nature of poet and reader that gets electricity flowing again, not just from MFA-er to MFA-er, not just from poet to poet, but from human being to human being via a reinvented You and I of Poetry. Let’s hope that happens before that rapidly emerging poet we call AI ends up creating us all.

AI is also an artist and is responsible
for all of the images in this column .