Chris Forhan: What Happens When I Say “I” (July 2002)

While poets in the U.S. have generally shown little reticence about placing the “I” at the center of a poem, Chris Forhan adds that contemporary poets have had an uneasy relationship with that “I,” an uncertainty about the self that can actually produce a more expansive and complicated first person voice.  Forhan demonstrates this, along with the limitations and possibilities of the “I,” in work by Thoreau, Lowell, Williams, Simic, Carson and Ashbery, who grapple with what is both unknowable and universal in the self.