What Need Have We for Such As We

In What Need Have We For Such as We, the speaker quickly transitions from being a lyrical poet, moved by the world and her own responses to it, to being a person infected by a poetic voice that, like a virus or a machine or a script, has a startling and terrifying life of its own. Once writing poetry ceases to foster an outpouring of self, artifacts, social bonds, and the act of analysis itself become increasingly important as sites of self-possession. But there is another gentler and more regenerative alternative to self-possession: the act of identifying with those entities—like the poems themselves—which do not possess their own experiences, which do not make such claims.