Poetry Craft · Lesson 5
Speaker and Persona
The “I” on the page is a made voice. Decide who is speaking, to whom, and why now.
16 min · Read → Apply → Prove
Step 1 · Read
The speaker is not automatically you
Professionals separate the poet from the mask. That is how a poem can tell a harder truth.
Even a diary-true poem is performed. The speaker has a situation: a time, an audience (the self, a lover, the dead, a city), and a reason to speak now rather than yesterday.
- Persona: you write as someone else (a mythic figure, an object, a stranger). The mask can tell what the private self will not.
- Address: who is “you”? A named person makes the poem a letter. An unnamed you can be the reader.
- Distance: a child speaker, an older speaker looking back, a public voice. Age and knowledge change the diction.
- If every poem sounds like the same coffee-shop “I,” try a constraint: one poem with no I, or an I who is lying.
Step 2 · Apply
Put it into practice
A short exercise to turn what you learned into skill.
Write a short poem in a chosen speaker. In the form field type free. Make the speaker specific (age, place, or a persona who is not you).
If you are writing as yourself, still name the moment: who are you talking to, and why tonight?
Step 3 · Prove
Lesson test
Pass with 70% or higher to complete this lesson.