Everyman Poetry

Because I thought of Frost's "Stopping By Woods" WRT women writers, noting that the narrator could easily be female, as indeed it could be someone of any race I pushed it further.  We can all zip ourselves into that one. There is admittedly some difference because of our expectations of the time period. Why would a black woman be out late with a horse cart in New Hampshire a century ago? It would distract us from the poem, thinking that there must be something else up that we are missing. Yet a black woman might zip herself into the narrator's head as she reads and have much the same experience as anyone else. It's an easy identification. Nor does the poem change much if Frost assigned the property to a woman...no wait, that does change it a lot, of a man contemplating a woman's forest.  Never mind. the narrator can be Everyman, but the locale and time is so specific that other deviations from Generic Person for the Setting will make it a different poem.

His other poems mostly do the same. The narrator of Christmas Trees, or The Road Not Taken could be easily imagined as many things other than a white male of productive age. Fire and Ice might change a bit in meaning if we thought the narrator a woman, but I don't think racial differences would matter much. Mending Wall could theoretically have a female narrator - this would be a farm wife after all, not a woman from the city - but somehow it doesn't quite work, and Two Tramps In Mud Time would have all sorts of extra meanings of them expecting her to give up her work for them to do instead, and her reaction to that. Interesting meanings, perhaps, but definitely different.

I have no inclination to consider the other poets. Not my remit. It does have a flavor of Borges asking us to imagine what Don Quixote, word for identical word, would mean if it had been written in the 20th C.