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I agree. I think that the poetic * I * and the narrator are both connected with the author. The poetic * I * and the narrator are only different tecniques used by the author to give to the reader his message and I would add that poetic tecniques are used both in prose and in poetry. The author has only one target, which is to comunicate to the reader, and he uses the technique that he think best to organise what he wants to comunicate. The work (poetry and/or novel) is always part of the person who is writing, the writer is what he has written .
Another important point is the receiver of the author's message; the reader. The poetic * I * and the narrator want to comunicate their feelings, opinion, suggestions...to somebody, they are just different technique to approach the reader but they both expect a relationship between the author and the reader, in other words, the poetic * I * and the narrator are both presenting (and manipulating) the author's reality to the reader. The reader is not interested in the writer, himself, but he is interested in what is written, novels and poems are about feelings, sensations, passions...and he wants to feel these elements. It is different (I am aware this can be judge as ambitious) if I read a historical book, where I am interested in facts, or if I read autobiography, where I am interested in a person's life and his opinions about historical facts and persons, but here I am talking about poetry and novels .
I shall make reference to two poems in order to give credit to my opinion. I want to analyse the poetic * I * in Ode to the West Wind and Ulysses. These poems are very different to each other, they were written in two different periods, they were thought with two different conceptions of the poetic * I * and they were destinated to two different kinds of reader, nevertheless, I shall try to demonstrate that the poetic * I * of these two poems has the same function (whch is also the narrator's function), which is to guide the author's feelings to the reader's attention .
The poetic * I * in Ode to the West Wind is clearly the poet. The poetic * I * in Tennyson's poem is Ulysses, the point is that the reader has to understand who Ulysses represents. Ulysses is a simbol, a myth, an imaginary through European culture (see * L'Ombra di Ulisse * P. Boitani), with all its potentiality <*> . He represents himself in the first four stanzas. The poetic * I * of two poems speak both of human beings giving a negative image of them . <*> (Ode to the West Wind) <*> , the reader understand that Itaca's inhabitants simbolize the human race while Ulysses can easily represent the poet himself not being a king <*> and searching for knowledge (see third stanza) which is typical of an intelectual person .
The poetic * I * is in both the poems above the rest of humanity, but they are reporting a message to the reader, theywant the reader to share their hopes, feelings, in other words they want to lift the reader above all the other people which means to become like the poetic * I *. The poet through the poetic * I * wants to share the same knowledge or/and message, or/and hope; <*> (Ode to the West Wind) <*> And this is exactly the narrator's role in a novel which is to make the reader part of the writer's feelings, hope and etc.etc .
