ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the question of voice in an effort to explore an aspect of listening and speaking that is believed to be pivotal to the analytic experience. Creating a voice with which to speak or to write might be thought of as a way, perhaps the principal way, in which an individual brings himself into being, comes to life, through his use of language. This conception of voice applies to all forms of language usage, whether in poetry, in fiction, in prose, in drama, in the analytic dialogue, or in everyday conversation. The chapter focuses on two twentieth-century American poems in an effort to provide a sense of voice how to make use of the concept. A poem, though itself an inanimate "thing", provides a living voice spoken to the reader and by the reader—a voice that can engage the reader in a firsthand, unmediated way.
