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Some thoughts on “finding your voice” and the terror there....

by Jeffrey Ethan Lee, updated 08/21/2004

Many poets talk about “finding your voice.” I’ll add to this that you never stop finding your voice. That is, if your voice stays open to the changes that affect your personality and identity as time passes, then ideally your poetic voice keeps evolving too. In your life in poetry, the first major event is finding your voice, but the struggle continues.

Sometimes history hands a poet a subject in which he or she finds a voice, e.g. Wilfred Owen was not much of a poet until WWI gave him graphic, indelible imagery like watching fellow soldiers dying in mustard gas without gas masks. Then he became a great poet with an “original voice” full of pathos and irony. Many have wondered if he could have carried his innovations and tragic vision forward in the post-war world, but he was killed in combat just before the war ended.

T. S. Eliot claimed that the post-war world was especially unpropitious for creating great poetry due to a universal “dissociation of sensibility.” There was no larger agreed upon belief system to which poets could refer and lean their work up against as e.g. Dante had his theological machinery to underpin the structure of his Divine Comedy which moves from Hell to Heaven in a very orderly way. You can’t have a Dante without having a mostly agreed upon Christian mythology. Unwilling to give up, Eliot made his greatest poems and found his voice in grumbling (in a Wagnerian operatic, multi-voiced style, no less) about the impossibility of having a voice as powerful and coherent as a Dante. In The Waste Land, he discovered a “voice” that proclaimed the impossibility of having a coherent voice. Thus, he also made life much harder for the rest of us (!) because, regardless of what you believed about Eliot’s beliefs in the impossibility of belief in modern poetry, his genius was so great that you had to respond to him.

Eliot did not get a free ride either, though, as he had to struggle with the voice of Yeats through his whole career. (Being a sort of a late Romantic and quasi-spiritualist mystic, Yeats had no trouble finding things to believe in, including ghosts, gyres, and much that seems occult to many readers now.) Nonetheless, Eliot also kept evolving in his poetic voice even after the seeming dead end of definitively saying significant poetry was impossible. In his case, a personal religious conversion became a great poem and a new style, “Ash Wednesday.” The generation that loved the disillusioned Eliot could have been disillusioned with the new Eliot if his new style were not as strong and original as the earlier poet. It is astonishing, then, that he was so successful at making such a public turn toward faith. I think Eliot was able to get away with this major life-change in his poetic style because his poetic voice stayed open while he was himself changing. He discovered faith for himself (read: he was suffering a lot) and was not merely reiterating the doctrine he was hearing. Religious and apocalyptic poets have to suffer profoundly, that is, to be believed.

(Incidentally, Hart Crane’s whole career could be seen as a desperate attempt to respond to the challenge of Eliot. Likewise, Wordsworth kept being haunted by Milton.)

Nonetheless, you need to define your “self” not merely for yourself but also against the great literature. You have to simultaneously really love that which is truly great that has gone before you and reinvent yourself, your voice, with that greater understanding.

So when a famous poet like Marilyn Nelson talks about “terror” in discovering her voice, I think this is a central problem for poets. You may find that:

(1) you just don’t like a lot of your true voice;

(2) parts of you are repugnant to many people (e.g. Whitman’s homosexuality);

(3) you’re not as hip as Ferlinghetti, as refined as Auden, etc;

(4) you are a liberal in a repressive age (Ginsberg in the 50s);

(5) people just don’t want to hear your pure self even if it is the most powerful and brilliant work in decades (Plath’s late bitch goddess voice, Rimbaud’s whole career);

(6) people find it easier to pity, patronize and dismiss you rather than to actually understand your vision of hell—and various corruptible heavens—for a black man in Mississippi and America in general (Etheridge Knight’s whole career);

(7) you discover your true voice but no one alive can understand even one percent of what you are really talking about until long after you are dead (Dickinson).

Why even start then? You have to really love the art and working with it.... If you love the art of poetry and strive to keep your voice open to evolving and changing, then your voice, your themes, and your style can grow deeper, more varied, and stronger for many years.