Writing Problems: the collective we

The collective we is one of the most common craft issues I see in manuscripts I work on through my editorial services. In general I find the collective we annoying, imprecise, and misused.

E.g.:

“We come and go like leaves”

“We humans are stuck”

“We were born in a garden”

“We are left in dust”

An argument can be made that since poetry, according to Octavio Paz, exists between “solitude and communion” that the speaker in a poem transcends the self into something more spacious, more collective, and that the plural first pronoun can be accurate.

The collective we in most examples I see in people’s manuscripts is intended to convey a moral or emotional weightiness, an identification with groups larger than the speaker themselves, or to lessen the discomfort between the speaker and the poet.

The simplest literary fix is to make all the instances of plural first person into singular first person, I. Since a person can be stuck, or be like a leaf, the comparison becomes manageable and can expand expectations. (Getting rid of we also includes “everybody” and “all.”)

One danger of the collective we in a poem is that it actually weakens the speaker’s authority. The speaker is now washed away in a collective, and their psychic position is subsumed by some larger group, but it’s amorphous, nonspecific, and becomes impossible to engage. It’s a big human Petri dish of me, you, them, everyone walking around the neighborhood.