“In Other Voices”: Role-Playing and Sympathetic Identification

This chapter revolves around the role-playing phenomenon of sympathetic identification at work in Seth’s poetry and prose. Like Browning and Keats—two poets distinguished by their common faculty of empathy—Seth constantly strives to become other, evincing an appreciation of a multiplicity of perspectives and a prismatic conception of personality. I pay special attention to the section “In Other Voices” in All You Who Sleep Tonight, highlighting that Seth’s chameleon powers in these poems are put at the service of an ethical and political imperative: bearing witness to man-made death and destruction. A section devoted to polyvocality in A Suitable Boy analyzes Seth’s use of free indirect speech, a vehicle for the ideal of a pluralist democracy that informs the novel.