The Essay Project: The Second-Person Pronoun

The next essay in the stack is “The Abuse of the Second-Person Pronoun” and there was no author attribution or note as to where it was published. Which is typical for a lot of these essays. An online search says the author is Jonathan Holden and book might be The Rhetoric of the Contemporary Lyric. Not sure about that. The book is out-of-print and I can't find a table of contents.

In this essay, the author makes a very good point but then stretches it to 18+ pages. Maybe an essay covering all the pronouns would have been tighter and more helpful.

Holden is taking issue with “the deployment…of an ambiguous ‘you’ that could refer to the reader, that could convey the third-person-singular sense of ‘one,’ or that could be the poet…musing to himself.”

“Such ambiguity is not," Holden says, "accidental…for the apparent bonuses are enormous….one would suppose that the reader, feeling that the poem were addressed to him personally, would enjoy a greater sense of intimacy with the speaker and stronger sense of the narrator’s speaking presence…”

“[the pronoun] helps to spur a poet through the lonely process of composition by providing him, in his solitude, with the illusion of a listener, with the sense that he is speaking to somebody, however ill-defined."

Holden talks about "the blurred ‘you’ “like the expression ‘you know?’ so often tagged onto the end of a sentence…the purported universality of the proposition…an unpremeditated, colloquial intimate tone that is far less pretentions that the sermonic ‘we’…which in a poem would sound unbearable stuffy and tweedy.”

With the universal 'you,' poets can “simultaneously emphasize particularity and universality at every juncture…both personal and prophetic…”

Holden summarizes with these three possibilities:

1. Substitute for “I” first-person pronoun, the poet himself, autobiographical.
2. Substitute for “I” first-person pronoun, a character in the poem speaking.
3. Address to a person the poet is speaking to (which can make the poem a “private, cryptic message to that person"). Holden feels the poem has an obligation to name this person in the text or as a title, for example “To Jenny” as a title.

Holden also suspects the second-person pronoun “may lessen the danger that the poet will sound self-pitying, over-introspective, whining or that the entire poem will seem somehow ‘too personal’ to be relevant…this impulse to place the poet in a more peripheral position in the poem is…the result of a continuing reaction against the excesses of the confessional mode….trying to find a less central position for the poet…”

Unfortunately, at least during the time of the essay (which as far as I can tell was in 1980 so this must be infractions of the 1970s), “too often it is being misapplied by poets in poems that have basically a testimonial or a narrative character.”

He goes on to give examples of 'you' poems that would be better as 'I' poems:

• Philip Booth’s “Still Life”
• Dennis Schmirtz’s “Rabbits” 
• Michael Ryan’s “This is a Poem for the Dead”

In these cases Holden feels “the substitution kills most of the poem’s feeling. ‘My place now’ is far less wooden than ‘your place now” and that “the speaking voice takes clear responsibility for what it is saying.” Plus, “the poem becomes a single human voice, and whether the speaker is fictional or real is of no consequence.”

Holden feels autobiographical poems should use the ‘I’ pronoun. However, there are instances when one part of the poet’s self is taking to another part of the self. Holden also insists the “blurred-you is a defensive tactic…[that] betrays the author’s anxiety by trying too hard.”

Perhaps. But there are many reasons why a poet would want to suppress a known ‘you’:

1. For self-protection (this could be personal, political or social).
2. To protect the subject or the ‘you’ person.
3. Because the poet is working through something, or possibly not ready to reveal the you.
4. For fun, to give the reader Easter Eggs.

Millions of secretes lie within poems for various reasons, not all due to defensiveness or anxiety (although they can be). Holden insists the ‘you’ “grasps at the reader’s collar, insisting too shrilly on his complicity.” (I think that’s projection).

Or that the second person “….protests far too loudly that the poem’s subject has universality.”

And here I think he has a point. Sometimes we over-estimate our 'you' universality. Holden calls this a form of faking, but I think it’s just one of the very human biases, consensus bias.

Holden is right in finding the style a bit trendy though: “it lends the poem a cool, poised attitude, a veneer or public decorum…”calls into question…the assumption of its absolute sincerity…the suave ‘you’—the you that commits itself to nothing and can turn the finest poem into an empty, elegant-sounding workshop exercise.”

Snap!

Holden asks “Why is the first-person…so much better?” He says because the view simply assumes the reader’s participation instead of cajoling it. He says, “true earnestness is the mark of the best poetry…”

Here we go. The best poetry is [insert your own self-satisfied idea here].

Holden says the best poetry is willing to make a fool of itself. But I say there is plenty of room for that in ‘you’ poems, too.

Good examples of the ‘you’ in a poem, according to Holden:

• Richard Wilbur’s “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World”
• Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy”
• Stephen Dunn’s “The Party To Which You Were Never Invited” 
• Philip Dacey’s “The Obscene Caller” 

In these poems, the substitution of 'I' for 'you' ruins the poem And that’s exactly what Holden recommends doing, writing your pieces both ways to see the tonal effects of both versions. He also spends pages describing how reading the poem before a live audience can tell you whether the ‘you’ pronoun is working for you and why reading poems in front of audiences is a swell thing and the difference between talking to the self in a lyric and an oral addresses, all of which seems a bit in the weeds for this essay.

Although critics of the second-person pronoun often claim, like Holden does, that “the reader cannot decide how to take this poem unless he knows to whom ‘you’ refers.” I disagree. As long as there is a vague outline of who the poem is addressed to, which can be hinted through the content, you're a-ok. And that’s the responsibility of the poet, to give some kind of guide (is this a love poem, a sibling poem, a friend poem, etc.?).

Similarly with the general 'you' as a casual replacement of ‘one’, this is the responsibility of the poet to identify somewhere in the content that the address should be taken as universal.