> > I wonder if I might ask this "old" question:
> >
> > Whom do poets write for? What is the "audience" we seek
> > to communicate with?
>
>God, naturally. (Or maybe that's playwrights - didn't Arthur Miller's last
>wife say something like that?)
I think it's an interesting question as a reader of poetry but likely to end
up in spinning round on the spot if asked of oneself. The ideal interlocutor
is an addressee, and that's a more practical and specific mode to be
discussed that 'audience'.
It depends how fully social anyone thinks writing is.
Certain writers seem to have had very particular audiences and others saw
the "common reader" as the enemy - Pound, maybe. Others didn't care, say,
Joyce, or didn't care much.
So I think the question is not "what is the audience" (human, presumably;
divine, possibly) but, how social is writing? For myself I think the answer
to this is: entirely.
Best,
Edmund
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