Features: The “Lyric I”: My Poetic Persona Is Not My Private Self

Sometime back, after finishing the poem “Journey to the Hereafter,” I shared it with a number of friends before publishing it on Facebook. The responses I received were telling: “Are you leaving for eternity?”, “No, don’t bring this kind of poem to me. Please, let us know if you are ready to go!”, “. . . And stop writing these types of writings 😢. Write about money—that’s what I want to see 😂”. Others joked that the poem sounded like I was “giving warning shots” before departing this world.

Their reactions are understandable when one reads lines such as:

“Someday my eyes will close forever

To the light and sights of this world,

As the force of life slips loose,

Beginning my journey to the hereafter.”

To many readers, such lines feel deeply personal—almost like a declaration. Yet the poem is not a confession of my immediate reality. It is a meditative voice, a persona contemplating mortality as a universal human condition rather than a private announcement.

A few months earlier, during a socio-cultural event, when the griots and cameramen turned their focus on me as photos were being taken, I appeared shy, tense, uncomfortable, and nervous. Two of my friends called out to me, half-jokingly: “Stop acting! With all the things you write in your poems, we know you.” I responded, “My poetry persona is different from my personal life.” They looked incredulous.

I receive similar reactions whenever I tell people—especially those who know me from work or academic circles—that I am a socially shy person. “You? No, I don’t believe that” is the typical response. I often have to clarify: in professional or academic contexts, I am not shy—but socially, I am.

This experience is not unique to me. It is not uncommon for individuals who are highly expressive or dramatic on social media to be reserved and quiet in real life.

This distinction becomes particularly important in poetry—especially in lyric poetry, which is often assumed to express the poet’s personal emotions and thoughts. To speak in voices that are not strictly their own, poets frequently create a persona: a constructed voice or character through which the poem speaks. Persona allows poets to express ideas, emotions, and narratives that are distinct from their lived identities, while still engaging readers through the intimacy of the first-person voice.

The “lyric I” refers to this first-person speaker—the “I” that expresses personal emotions, thoughts, or intimate experiences in a poem. However, readers often assume that this “I” directly reflects the poet’s private life. This assumption has been reinforced by the rise of mid-20th-century confessional poetry, which blurred the boundary between lived experience and poetic expression. As a result, many readers fall into what can be described as the “lyric I trap”—the tendency to equate the speaker of a poem with the poet themselves.

While some poets draw directly from personal experience, much lyric poetry relies on a constructed voice rather than confession.

In reality, the lyric “I” is often a carefully crafted persona rather than a literal self. It is used to create intimacy, to embody others, and to explore perspectives beyond the poet’s immediate experience without being strictly autobiographical. The lyric voice often balances between the personal and the universal, allowing poets to engage with emotions that are emotionally truewithout being literally true to their private lives.

This becomes clearer when we consider how the “I” functions across my different poems.

In “I Am the Elders,” the speaker declares:

“I am the elders

Of my youth, and of the young,

All morphed into one.

I have walked decades in their shoes,

Lived life and survived death to be here:

Confluence of growing up and being elderly.”

Here, the “I” is not autobiographical. It is a philosophical and collective persona, embodying generational continuity and cultural memory. The speaker is not a single individual but a convergence of time, experience, and identity.

Similarly, in “I Was Open-Minded Until I Met Gambia,” the voice appears intensely personal:

“I was open-minded, then I met Gambia:

From a slumber of naïveté, I was jolted;

Hit with reality and gravity of cynicism,

I lost my innocence of objectivity—”

Yet even here, the “I” functions as a representative voice, articulating a broader social and cultural disillusionment. The poem moves beyond the personal into the collective, using the first person to give immediacy to a shared experience.

Across these poems, the “I” shifts—from meditative, to philosophical, to socially reflective. What remains constant is not the identity of the speaker, but the function of the voice.

Through the lyric “I”, poets explore experiences that may not fit their everyday identities. They can write from positions of grief, longing, disillusionment, or hope—not necessarily as direct expressions of their own lives, but as imaginative engagements with these emotional states. The lyric “I” enables poets to inhabit different roles, perspectives, and even identities, expanding the scope of empathy and creative exploration. It opens the door to irony, social commentary, and layered storytelling, enriching the poetic experience.

In this sense, persona also functions as a kind of protective shield. It allows the poet’s work to engage deeply with the world while preserving a boundary between artistic expression and private identity. The persona is always connected to perspective—it reflects not who the poet is in a literal sense, but how the poet chooses to see, interpret, and represent experience.

Ultimately, the “I” in my poems is not always me. It is a voice I construct—a medium through which I think, feel, and explore the world. To read it as a direct reflection of my private life is to miss the creative and imaginative work that poetry performs.

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