The Problem of People in Lyric Poetry

Working on an essay that situates my lyric poems into the broader concerns of lyric poetry. I'm writing about the relationship between poet and people and how (the issues surrounding relationships with) people appear in and behind lyric poetry, though they are ultimately filtered through the poet's self and experience. Anyway, found the best passage ever from Sylvia Plath's Unabridged Journals (of course I would quote Sylvia Plath) to support my personal ars poetica, and now I will share with you:

I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love's not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time.

Marriage and the lyric problem

I know two twenty-year-olds who plan on becoming engaged, but they aren't engaged. Essentially, they are engaged to be engaged. Am I missing something? I'm not engaged, nor do I plan on becoming engaged any time soon (that would require a willing party to consent to my marriage proposal, after all), but I think if I were looking toward the future, I might think about asking someone to marry me. I might plan it out and weigh my options, and I might even discuss marriage with that person. But announcing to the world--and expecting cheers and congratulations--for planning on promising to marry someone but not promising yet? Give me a break.

My thinking about marriage comes as a result of class tonight. My mind wanders, even in classes I really enjoy (looks I've incriminated myself to my past teachers who read this blog), and as I gazed around the room, I realized something: I was the only non-married (or long-term committed) person sitting at the table. Not that that changes how I perform in the class, but it's something to think about. I wonder how marriage informs my classmates' writing. Husbands/wives/significant others have appeared in at least three people's poems that I can remember. I also remember really liking those poems, the ways they dealt with the problem of people. If living in the world with with other people is an issue that complicates the lyric, I wonder what living in a house with another person with whom you share life, love, and a last name does to the writer of the lyric.

My poetry, not surprisingly, is self-interested. I write a lot about what's going on with me, how other people's words and actions bear upon my life. What's at stake, in my life and in my writing, is something internal, like a struggle to find and voice a meaning for who I am as an individual. When I write about other people, like my mother or my grandmother or a woman I over hear spouting anti-feminist rhetoric on the street, what I'm doing is working through how they affect me in some way. I'm not sure I've yet written about how my life acts as an agent to affect change in another's. I wonder if marriage makes the writer understand more clearly her role in a community of selves with power to influence another. I sure have heard enough people talk of the ways becoming a parent informs their identity and their writing, and I wonder if being married does something similar.

All that said, I don't think my voice is self-serving, nor do I think only married poets write the best lyrics. I'm just interested in the lyric mode and its function of dealing with the self in relation to others and how someone in a committed relationship with another approaches the problem with people differently than a single person.

Any ideas, recommended reading, or "stop thinking so much, Tims" would be greatly appreciated.