2026 STAAR RLA Vocabulary Complete Practice Test

The main idea is recognizing who is telling the story or expressing the poem’s inside voice. In poetry and narrative, that voice is called the speaker. The speaker is the voice through which the poem’s events, feelings, or ideas are presented, and it can be the poet themselves or a persona the author creates. It’s not the author who wrote the piece, and it’s not necessarily the main character in the story—that role is the protagonist in prose, the central figure of the plot. So the voice you hear guiding the poem is the speaker.