Voice is an active, physical thing in oral poetry. It needs a speaker
and a listener, a performer and an audience. It is a bodily creation
that thrives in live connection. The voice is the mechanism by which a
"poet's voice" comes alive. Reciting a poem aloud the reciter comes to
understand and then to be the 'voice' of the poem. As poetry is a vocal
art, the speaker brings their own experience to it, changing it
according to their own sensibilities, intonation, the matter of sound
making sense; controlled through pitch and stress, poems are full of
invisible italicized contrasts. Reading poetry aloud also makes clear
the "pause" as an element of poetry.
The Wall