Authorial Intrusion

[Quixilated]

I don't understand what's wrong with writing a poem in a form in the first person. Haven't people been doing that since....always?

Yes they have, since ever and ever.     There is nothing wrong with writing a poem in the first person.  

Examples:

Poe:
"Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary" 
 

Tennyson:
"Break, break, break, 
         On thy cold gray stones, O Sea! 
And I would that my tongue could utter 
         The thoughts that arise in me."


Whitman:
"I sing the body electric, 
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them, 
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them, 
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul. "


Keats:
"When I have fears that I may cease to be 
   Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,"


Dickinson:
"Because I could not stop for Death – 
He kindly stopped for me – 
The Carriage held but just Ourselves – 
And Immortality. "


Shakespeare:
"When I do count the clock that tells the time, 
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night; 
When I behold the violet past prime, 
And sable curls all silver’d o’er with white;"


Donne:
"Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you 
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; 
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend 
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new."


Wordsworth:
"I wandered lonely as a cloud 
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,"


Eliot:
"LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,"


Sandburg:
"Naked I stood on the soft shingle of sand where the sea swept my legs with salt and wet.
Alone I walked under the arch of night where stars fluttered between treetops in the wind.
And a long memory it is I have how the sea and the night were kind."


Williams:
"I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox"


Blake:
"I saw a chapel all of gold 
That none did dare to enter in 
And many weeping stood without 
Weeping mourning worshipping"


The Dream of the Rood ("since ever")
"Listen! The choicest of visions I wish to tell,
which came as a dream in middle-night,
after voice-bearers lay at rest.
It seemed that I saw a most wondrous tree"