We think of ourselves as having voices, but these days our poets are voices. That is to say, the word “voice” has come to be synonymous with the word “poet” in all of those venues in which we discuss poetry, ranging from critical essays and reviews to the blurbs on the backs of the poets’ books. If I had entitled my essay “New Voices in American Poetry,” you would have expected to read about some new young poets, emerging, even as nations do, from the backdrop of their obscurity. A recent blurb describes such a recently emerged poet as one of the “best new voices in American poetry.” This identification of poetry with voice is in fact so much of a commonplace as to be largely unnoticeable to us and something that we do not object to when we do notice it.

Despite the ubiquity of the usage, it was not always so: John Dryden and Alexander Pope did not speak of a poet’s “voice,” but of his “thought,” and in his “Essay on Criticism,” Pope famously described the poet’s task as that of producing “What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed.” Thought, in Pope’s familiar formulation, represents itself as something highly conventional: the often-thought is something that men of common sense would find themselves in agreement on; the poet’s task is to make that consensus memorable through the expressive powers of his genius, which, unlike that of the modern poet, can only function in a