HOW TO DESCRIBE THE "SPEAKER" IN THE POEM? ["POET", "LYRIC SUBJECT", "LYRIC 'I'", "LYRIC HERO" AND OTHER TERMS USED IN THE ANALYSIS OF LYRIC POETRY]

In nineteenth-century Romantic poetry, the lyric "I" was usually identified with the poet himself. This changed at the beginning of the twentieth century, when poets (Pound and Eliot, for instance) introduced speakers ("personae") into their poetry who were clearly different from themselves. Instead of "the poet", new terms were introduced to refer to the speaker in the poem. In German lyric theory, the term "das lyrische Ich" ("the lyric I") became popular, as in Russian did "liricheskii geroi" ("the lyric hero"). English and American critics generally use "the speaker" and "the poet" (often indiscriminately in the same book or article). As the speaker in the poem is, in principle, a fictive construct and cannot be identified with the poet, and as many poems do not have an "I", this paper argues for the use of the term "the speaker".