We have already seen that Larkin's poems often draw on the poet's own experiences, and biographical readings, which attract so many readers, can sometimes be illuminating; but we have also seen that they need to be made with care. This is such an important issue for Larkin's poetry, and raises such an important question in literary criticism, that it is now necessary to turn to a discussion of Larkin's use of a persona – a device that runs right through his work, and is often crucial to understanding the relationship between man and poem.

It was a commonplace of Romantic poetic theory that poetry, especially lyric poetry, is the most direct of human utterances, the unmediated, unevasive expression of the poet's emotion. Keats strove to capture ‘the true voice of feeling’ in his poems, Wordsworth defined poetry as ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’, and praised Shakespeare's sonnets because in them the poet ‘unlocked his heart’; Ruskin defined lyric poetry as ‘the expression by the poet of his own feelings’. The reaction against this view in the twentieth century claimed that the poetic speaker is always constructed, that even the most apparently personal lyric has a dramatic speaker distinct from the poet; and as a result it has become common to refer to the ‘I ’ of a poem not as ‘Shelley’ or ‘Yeats’ or ‘Larkin’, but as ‘the speaker’ or ‘the persona’.

Of course nineteenth-century critics knew perfectly well that not all poetry was directly uttered by the poet. We cannot identify every character in Macbeth or Othello with Shakespeare, since it is the very nature of drama that it depicts interaction between different persons, so that when we read a speech by Othello or Iago we attend not only to what is said, but also to who is saying it. A Romantic theorist will no doubt claim that Macbeth's despair (‘Life's but a walking shadow… a tale | Told by an idiot’) springs from some deep experience of the author's, but he still knows that the experience of reading Macbeth's speeches is not the same as that of reading a despairing sonnet (like No. 66) of Shakespeare's, since we are constantly aware that we are listening not to a self-contained expression of emotion but to Macbeth, the man whose story is unfolding before us.