Don't poets get to write persona poems anymore? WD Snodgrass wrote a thick collection of poems in the voices of various Nazis, and needless to say they expressed some pretty horrifically hateful points of view. The question here shouldn't be do we like the speaker of the poem, but is the speaker coming across as an authentic example of a person we don't like. If somehow the poet is inviting us to side with or sympathize with the speaker's outlook, then we are in the land of offensiveness, but as I read it (only once, which was enough for me) I didn't get the feeling that the views of the persona were being endorsed.
|