Capturing Characters in Poetry
Poetry is not the first place many people turn to when discussing characters and character development. Most readers probably think of fiction and maybe creative nonfiction, but poetry? Probably not. Still, many of the oldest pieces of written literature were actually epic poems, including the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Odyssey. These poetic stories included well-developed plots and interesting characters.
However, poets don’t have to write epics to capture characters in their poems. In fact, Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology collects the voices of more than 200 different characters, albeit dead characters. Nearly every poem in the collection is titled as the name of the narrator, who shares a bit about their life and death and the fictional town of Spoon River itself. These poems are epitaphs but also persona poems, which are written by poets taking on another person’s point of view.
Literature classes may debate whether all first-person poems should be treated as the actual poet (or a narrative persona representing the poet), but persona poems are blatantly supposed to be someone else. The persona could be someone famous but also someone more obscure or personal (for instance, I once wrote a persona poem in the imagined voice of my grandmother). A couple of great collections to find more contemporary examples of persona poems include Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler, which includes persona poems for George W. Bush and Hurricane Katrina, and Julianna Baggott’s Lizzie Borden in Love: Poems in Women’s Voices, which includes persona poems for Borden, Mary Todd Lincoln, and Monica Lewinsky.
Poets can write first-person poems about other characters without taking on their persona. In Zeina Hashem Beck’s “Message From My Aunt on Her Son’s Death Anniversary,” the narrator (possibly the poet) works through the possible reasons their aunt sent an orange emoticon, including whether it was accidental or with intention. In “The Carpenter Ant,” Terrance Hayes also writes a poem in which the narrator speaks of their aunt, this time using the aunt’s final behaviors in life to connect to the behaviors of the carpenter ant and the narrator’s own thoughts and desires.
Of course, we started with the epics, which were written in third person, and it’s definitely possible to write shorter third-person poems with characters. One of my all-time favorite poems, “Going Home,” by Wisława Szymborska as translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh, is an 11-line masterpiece that explains everything about a nameless man’s life while putting him to bed. Another good example of a third-person character-based poem is Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” about two sisters and their interactions with goblins trying to sell them a variety of fruits. Donald Hall’s “The Man in the Dead Machine” is an interesting character-based poem, because the first two stanzas seem to be in third person about a deceased World War II pilot before a startling shift into a first-person persona poem for the final stanza (to imagine an alternate reality or fate for the man).
Write Your Own Character-Based Poems
Try your hand at writing character-based poems by choosing a subject (somebody famous or perhaps a local cashier or librarian). With your subject in mind, try all three of the following to see how each attempt is different:
- Write a persona poem, taking on your subject’s perspective and voice.
- Write a first-person poem about your subject in the narrator’s perspective and voice, which may or may not be your own.
- Write a third-person poem about your subject.
If you’re really feeling ambitious, you could even try your hand at writing the next great epic.
