The speaker is the voice that addresses the reader in a poem — the “I” (explicit or implied) who perceives, reflects, and speaks. The speaker is to poetry what the narrator is to fiction: the figure through whom the work is experienced. And like the narrator, the speaker is not the poet.
This distinction matters. When Sylvia Plath writes “Dying / Is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well,” the speaker is a constructed persona — a voice crafted for this poem’s purposes. Reading the speaker as Plath herself collapses the distance between art and biography, limiting what the poem can mean.
Some poems create speakers who are clearly distinct from the poet — Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues give voice to murderers, bishops, and Renaissance painters. Others create speakers who seem close to the poet but remain constructed — confessional poets like Plath and Lowell built speakers from autobiographical material without being identical to it. Still others suppress the speaker entirely — some imagist poems present images without a visible “I,” though even here a speaker is implied by the act of selection and arrangement.
The speaker’s relationship to the poem’s content determines the poem’s tone. A speaker who is detached creates ironic distance. A speaker who is immersed creates intensity. A speaker who addresses a specific “you” creates intimacy. These are craft choices, not accidents of personality.