Classic poems about selfhood and identity

Poetry and self-expression go hand in hand: we often treat them as synonymous. Of course, this is a relatively modern notion, largely the legacy of the Romantics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – and poets in the twentieth century in particular have sought to move away from this idea of poetry as a record of the poet’s own self. (See T. S. Eliot’s influential essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ for one prominent example.) Nonetheless, many poets have written about the self, and their individual identity, as the following classic poems about selfhood demonstrate.

William Wordsworth, ‘Tintern Abbey’. This is one of Wordsworth’s most famous poems and one of the best-loved of the English Romantic movement. In this blank-verse meditation prompted by the ruins of the medieval Welsh abbey that gives the poem its title (although the full title is considerably longer), Wordsworth muses upon the ‘true self’ which creativity allows the poet to recover. The poem’s full title is ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour’. Read the rest of this entry →