James Longenbach: The Spokenness of Poetry (July 2003)

What we call “voice” in poems is intrinsically dialogical, James Longenbach argues: “Implicit in those very poems that encourage us to think of them as having a voice is the critique of the idea of a singular, unified voice,” yet no matter how overtly “fragmented” the language in a poem may be, no poem can avoid the impression of a unified utterance.  Longenbach explores this dialogical voice—this concurrent “speaking” and “shattering”—in work by Hart Crane, Robert Browning, James Joyce and Louise Glück.