From April Bernard's essay, Notes on the First Person (in which she goes into the traditional history of lyrical poetry and the effects the confessional poets has upon the reading public):

And here is an interesting feature: When a rock star, an actual rock star, sings about this love or that fight or this child, his audience usually allows for that same mix of real-and-unreal that the lyric poem traditionally has been granted. Do we think Bruce Springsteen has just fallen in love with his “Jersey Girl?” (He didn’t even write the song; Tom Waits did.) Think how many defenders of Eminen explained that he was singing from a “persona,” and so we mustn’t take his sexist, racist, homophobic ranting at face value.

Well and good, say I, but what about poetry? When I read a poem, what am I to make of a well-meaning member of the audience who comes up to me afterward, wanting reassurance that I am “all right,” because the speaker in one of my poems was evidently not “all right”? In my newest book, Romanticism, I thought I had taken every possible precaution to alert the reader that I am writing about a particular period and mode, that I am writing about a particular period and mode, that there are many voices at work here, and that many of the poems are, as the notes make explicit, fictional. And yet one reviewer presumes that these are all personal, moreover, about my personal life, and that my tone can be discerned as “embittered.”