Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas Harrison

The provocation here is aimed at poetry's most beloved alibi: the idea that a poem is a direct line to an inner, private self. Harrison turns that assumption inside out. If "subjectivity" is not a timeless essence but something "historically constructed", then the lyric "I" stops being a natural voice and becomes a cultural technology: a way of speaking that history teaches people to recognize as authentic.

The sentence works by posing a question that sounds metaphysical but is really political. "What actually speaks" implies an agent behind the poem, yet the only candidate offered is already compromised. Subjectivity, in this frame, isn't the source of the poem; it's one of the poem's effects, produced by institutions (education, religion, the state), genres (the lyric, the confession), and available vocabularies of feeling. The poet doesn't simply express a self; the poem performs a version of selfhood that a given era can hear, reward, and circulate.

Harrison's phrasing also quietly attacks a common critical reflex: treating poems as psychological documents. If the speaking voice is constructed, then interpretation can't stop at personal sincerity. It has to ask why certain kinds of "inner life" become legible at particular moments, and who gets to claim that legibility. Read this way, the line is a challenge to romantic individualism and a nudge toward historical thinking: the poem may feel intimate, but its intimacy has a genealogy. The "question remains" because the answer is inconvenient; it forces readers to hear history, not just emotion, in the voice on the page.