Choric Song and Modern Poetry

Is the poet who is saying “we” adopting a bardic privilege of speaking for the many, or is he implying a collective voice? The collective conception within lyric voice is brought to the surface and politicized in American democratic poetics from Walt Whitman to Juliana Spahr. But it is already latent in much of the lyric genre, which has its roots in Greek choric song and in the biblical psalms that were used for congregational ritual. In later poetry that draws from these traditions, such as Marvell's “The Bermudas” and Tennyson's “The Lotos Eaters,” the first person plural becomes a site for the ambiguous interplay between the ritual and fictive dimensions of lyric voice.