Blevins has published essays and poems in many magazines, journals, and anthologies and teaches writing at Roanoke College. In this essay, Blevins suggests the success of Hugo's poem can be attributed to the way in which Hugo uses the lyric speaker to invent a character of ethos.

Recent books of important criticism on American poetry have sought to evaluate the work of contemporary poets in terms of Aristotle's "ethos" (from The Rhetoric), which relates the value of a text to its speaker's ability to persuade, which is then related to the text's ability to present a speaker as a person of character. Carl Dennis's Poetry as Persuasion suggests that the speakers of poems can only be authentic if they are inclusive, discriminating, passionate, and generous. In other words, a poem can only work if its speaker reveals himself or herself to be a person readers can care...