The HyperTexts

The You and I of Poetry
by David Alpaugh

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 one’s name – the livelong June – 
To an admiring Bog!

All poems have a You and an I—although they don’t always use those pronouns explicitly as do Eliot, Frost, and Dickinson in the poems I just quoted. In the simplest instance the I is what we call THE POET—a wise, perceptive, linguistically brilliant 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, and Walt Whitman tells us that great poets need great readers. 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 provides the energy source that generates what we might well call the electricity or current of the poem.

But You and I can get complicated. 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 entitled, above-the-law, 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 is still there, in the wings, presenting Holy Willie, the Duke, or Prufrock, to you, the reader. In a persona poem there’s a secret compact between the reader and the poem’s Uber-poet. Together, we observe, listen to, and silently agree on our assessment of the speaker.
Prufrock’s opening line, “Let us go then, you and I” seems to be directed to us, but we soon realize that there’s another you in the poem. Prufrock is talking to himself, to an alter ego or imaginary friend. Still, as we walk with him through London streets and rooms, overhearing his private conversation, we feel that Prufrock is speaking to us as well.

In Robert Frost’s “The Pasture,” spring has just sprung. A farmer is inviting his wife or child to explore the farm with him, but we sense that his “You come too” also includes us as readers, that 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 loved one that their jaunt will not take too much of the loved one’s time, and Frost’s way of letting potential readers know that his poetry will not overstay his welcome, just take the time needed to entertain and enlighten us (waiting to watch water clear and enjoying the infant calf, tottering by its mother).

In “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” Emily Dickinson has fun portraying you as a kindred spirit. Her poem has an admission requirement. Are you offended, disgusted, bored and a wee bit amused by the antics of self-promoting egotists? If so, your You and her I can become best friends. Together we can contemplate, 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 individuals and stand with the poet in rejecting such slimy behavior.

Alexander Pope has an explicit You and I poem that reminds us that a persona need not be a human being. In 1738, Pope gave a puppy to Frederick, Prince of Wales, whose estate was located in the Kew district of London. Pope wrote a couplet and had it engraved on a beautiful collar he put around the dog’s neck. Pope’s poem was written to be read, not on a page, but on a piece of jewelry. What we have here sounds like an 18th century attempt at a 1960’s “happening”— structured more like living theater than poetry. In order to be asked “Whose dog are you?” an earl, duke, or courtier must kneel and become a living metaphor for subservience to more powerful persons or parties. The collar, probably made of gold, adds desire for monetary gain to the indictment.

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 enlightening and entertaining the fusion between poet and reader will easily take place.

Keep in mind that when a poet asks you to go along with an I, you can 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 poem “Crazy Dave Talks With the Poets,” I have fun answering, “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 like the I of the poem and whether you are comfortable with the YOU the I is asking you to become.

Poets often condense their I and You into a We and / or Us. It’s a way of conferring the poet’s ID 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 imaginary friend, Prufrock and You, Eliot and You have all lingered together in a mesmerizing, imaginary 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, leave its fictional world, and return to a world with real human voices, informed or transformed by your fictional experience.

In Rilke’s poem “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.” You are standing by the poet in a gallery or museum. You both feel that the missing parts of the statue, with its “eyes like ripening fruit” and its loins “where procreation flared,” are still active. “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 to readers everywhere) with a final line that rockets us back into reality with the gauntlet thrown down by a perfect work of art: “You must change your life.”

In her poem “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 her metaphor for life’s journey through time and space and humankind’s inability to truly grasp the fact that we are mortal and 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.”

In “The Emperor of Ice Cream” Wallace Stevens confers his identity upon you by making you collaborate with him on the poem!

Call the roller of big cigars, / The muscular one, and bid him whip / In kitchen cups concupiscent curds. / Let the wenches dawdle in such dress / As they are used to wear, and let the boys / Bring flowers in last month's newspapers. / Let be be finale of seem. / The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Stevens is more like MapQuest or GPS than a poet. He’s just giving directions. You call the roller of big cigars, you let the wenches dawdle, you allow the boys to bring the girls flowers. You initiate, actualize, allow, and confirm everything that happens in the poem.
 
You are even more active in the second stanza which shifts from spring. youth, life, vibrancy to winter, agedness, decrepitude, and death. You take from a dresser a sheet and spread it to cover a dead woman’s face. You let a lamp shine on her deathbed. Stevens has whipped you into the metaphorical ice cream of his poem, conferring his identity and the poem’s substance upon you.
 
But how about the naysayer, the poet who says, “I don’t care about the reader, I don’t have a you in mind when I write. I write for myself!” True, we do write for ourselves. But that doesn’t mean that only an I remains. As I write a poem, my own you, my internal reader, reacts to my work simultaneously, line by line, pleased or displeased by how I am expressing myself.
 
Writing is a process wherein, not unlike Prufrock, we have conversations with ourselves. If we have nurtured our internal reader with great poetry, and if we put egotism aside and listen when our You is not satisfied with a word or line or image or metaphor we may not end up with a great poem, but at least it will be a more perfect one. It’s only when not even a syllable makes You and I, your writer and reader wince that, together, you are ready to deliver the poem to outside readers via publication—to rely, as Blanche DuBois would say, “on the kindness of strangers.”
 
Whether you write for your internal or outside reader don’t forget your obligation to entertain. T. S. Eliot defines poetry as “a superior amusement,” undoubtedly thinking both of the Muse and the amusement park. “If it isn’t fun,” D.H. Lawrence advises us, “don’t do it.” No tragedy is more serious than Hamlet. It is still being performed all over the world, along with Macbeth and King Lear, because it is profoundly entertaining.
 
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, both spiritually and aesthetically, 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 new generations of readers, who felt that poetry was suddenly speaking to them once again.
 
In the middle of the last century poets who became known as the Beats and Confessionals once again revolutionized the You and I of Poetry. Tired of the generic, biographically reticent poetry of the Modernists, they forged a new “I”—eager to share intimate, disturbing, ruthlessly honest personal details that would have been unthinkable for Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, or Wallace Stevens to divulge.
 
Their readers felt honored to be confidantes, to listen sympathetically to Robert Lowell explore his troubled family lineage in “Life Studies” and his chaotic marital problems in his sonnets. In Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus,” you become her special friend, eager to witness the most intimate, darkest details of her life, willing to understand her traumas, her suicidal nature, and refrain from judgment.
 
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 poetical fiction. Electricity was flowing through the You and I lifeline once again.
 
Needless to say, Plath, Ginsberg, Lowell, Ferlinghetti and other Beats and Confessionals could not have mesmerized the literary world had their poetry not been extremely entertaining.
 
Have we had a poetic revolution since the 1950s? Well, we have post-modernism, neo-formalism, post-confessionalism, Language Poetry, Slam poetry and a number of other “schools.” And now that a poet with the pen name AI can turn out a poem as good as your average MFA graduate in seconds, it looks like post-human poetry is on its way. If so, it will transform the You and I of Poetry in ways poets and readers never thought possible.
 
After class, students occasionally come up to me to complain about “those poems in the New Yorker.” The phrase “I just don’t get it” occurs again and again. I try to explain that, not all, but many New Yorker poems are written, not for the general reader, but for other poets and their graduate students. Both You and I have become specialized.
 
Another revolution will eventually happen, and it will involve yet another dramatic change in the nature of poet and reader. As independent poets, I believe we are best positioned to make that revolution happen, to get the electricity flowing again, not from specialist to specialist, not from poet to poet, but from human being to human being via the You and I of Poetry.

The HyperTexts