The author and the speaker in a poem

- [ ] Just as figurative language and structure are important parts of a poem that a reader must understand to derive meaning from the poem, so are the author and the speaker. The first step to understanding these two elements is to understand the difference between them. The "author" of a poem is simply the person who typed, wrote, or in some other way created a poem. The "speaker" of a poem is the character, real or made up, who's personality forms the poem. In other words, it's the character who's personality the reader comes to understand through reading the poem. The challenge in differentiating between the two is that many times the speaker of the poem and the author are the same person, the important distinction being that the speaker is only a part of the author's personality, not his, her or their entire person. Take an example where the author and the speaker are not the same person at all. For example, say I were to write a poem from the perspective of a character named Fred. The author is me, as I created the poem, and the speaker as Fred, because if you were to read the poem and gather information about the person who's perspective the poem was being told from, the information you gathered would describe Fred, not myself. The complication is when an author writes a poem from his, her, or their own perspective. If I do that, for example, it might seem at first as if the author and speaker are equivalent, as they are both Hunter. What has to be understood is that while I myself am indeed Hunter, completely and thoroughly, the speaker is only as much of Hunter as can be understood from the poem. One simply cannot encase all of one's self into a single poem. As I write a poem about an event I experienced, the speaker may share experiences, emotions and even a name with me, but he is not all of me. He is a separate person from me, who's only thoughts and experiences are the ones that can be learned about by reading the poem. If I am usually a sarcastic person, for example, but I write a very sincere poem that never involves or references my sarcasm, then the speaker of the poem is not a sarcastic person. In short, the speaker is only a persona created by the author, though it may bear very strong resemblance to the author or the author's past self.