This is a subject of considerable interest to me. My notion of voice is a combination of matter and method. Some writers have it in spades, and others don't. For instance, I don't think Coleridge has a particularly distinctive voice. Coming to him cold, I don't think I'd guess that Frost at Midnight, the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Kubla Khan were written by one man. Among the best poets of our times Wilbur and Hecht have absolutely distinctive voices, but I don't think you'd say that of Donald Justice.
Looking at younger poets, Williamson's voice is absolutely distinctive. I think it proceeds from his youth in Nashville and his way of looking at the world. The accent is honey and magnolia, and he brings a wry wit to the service of high seriousness. Much the same can be said of Sam Gwynn, although his verse is far more sardonic than Greg's, and you'd never mistake one for the other. I'd also note that each "found" his voice in his early twenties. In Sam's first book there's one poem that sounds like Auden, but everything else is distinctively Gwynn.
That wasn't the case with me. Until I was 32 I sounded like someone other than Murphy. It is hard to believe that the Early Poems section of my first book is written by the hunter and farmer and sailor I later became.
Looking round the Sphere, we have some very distinctive voices. Whether the poem is funny or serious, one simply cannot mistake Hayes. There is an informal, anecdotal Irishness to his formal speech which is unmistakable. John Beaton's is another highly distinctive voice. In his case too it is a matter of a marriage of matter and method. Poems about the Highlands, the Pacific Northwest, fishing, all told with a great sort of rolling sonority that is distinctly his.
"Ah, Mister Man of Snow,
With your well-versed, wintry mind
And icy, bitumen stare,
You're making your cameo
In a high, supercilious hat
With the unperturbable air
Of the coolest aristocrat
In all of Snowmankind."
There's Williamson in his early twenties. Now contrast that to the "cave guy grilling mammoth steaks" over at the Fire thread on Lariat. The voice is astonishingly consistent over two decades.
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