Augusta Webster and the Universal Poet Sydney Griffin College

In the essay “Poets and Personal Pronouns," Augusta Webster discusses the amount of personal expression that a poet inserts into his or her own work. She delves into the differences between a novelist and poet and elaborates on the importance of creative imagination; she even analyzes a poet’s usage of personal pronouns and what each pronoun may indicate to the reader. Throughout the essay, she constantly asserts the importance of realizing that an individual poet is separate from the self he presents in his own work.

To open the essay, Webster begins with a comparison of a novelist and poet. A novelist, she asserts, must not follow the same rules as a poet. From a novelist, we expect “a definiteness and possibility for each personage, a suitability of conduct and language, and sentiment, to the epoch and theatre of events chosen, which shall make the story read as true” (Webster, “Poets and Personal Pronouns”). When perusing a novel, the reader expects that all events are plausible. The reader is meant to believe the events in the story as true in order to fully immerse himself in the novel. As Webster shortly after points out, this is very unlike the purpose of a poet.

Webster asserts that we expect very different things from...