The only character clearly delineated in the poem is the speaker. Even then, he has a fairly minimal role. The first-person pronoun "I" only appears in the final stanza (13). The speaker has spent the preceding 12 lines asking a variety of questions about what poetry ought to, or needs to, be. At the end, he concludes by placing himself within this argument, answering his questions by stating that he does not feel the need for elegant language in his poetry. The speaker is presumably a poet himself, yet other than this, we get little sense of him as a character.