Persona in poetry
Persona in poetry refers to a literary device where poets create fictional characters or voices to express thoughts, emotions, and narratives, distinct from their own. This technique is rooted in the dramatic traditions of ancient Greece and became prominent in English literature during the Victorian Era, particularly through the works of Robert Browning, who utilized dramatic monologues to explore complex characters. The term "persona," derived from the Latin for "mask" or "character," allows poets to convey their viewpoints while engaging readers through the first-person perspective of these fictional narrators.
During the modernist movement, poets like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound further popularized persona poetry, expanding its creative possibilities. Persona poems often present self-contained narratives and imply a direct dialogue between the speaker and the reader, fostering a unique connection. This technique enables poets to explore diverse subjects and perspectives that may be outside their personal experiences, allowing for irony, social commentary, and innovative storytelling. By adopting personas, poets can delve into themes that reflect the human condition while maintaining a distance from their own identities, enriching the overall poetic experience.
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Persona in poetry
While poets frequently present their works using authentic, first-person viewpoints, they also sometimes create fictional characters who serve as speakers on the poet’s behalf. The poetic device of using a third-party stand-in for the poet’s own voice is known as a persona. Etymologically, the term comes from the Latin word persona, which literally means “person” but entered literary usage as referring to a “character” or a dramatic “mask.”
Though rooted in the dramatic traditions of ancient Greece, the concept of poetic personas fully arrived in English literature during the Victorian Era (1837–1901). The subsequent literary popularization of personas, which reached its initial peak in the modernist movement of the twentieth century, gave rise to a specific subgenre of poetry known as the “persona poem.” Many well-known figures of modern poetry, including Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Sylvia Plath, have come to be closely associated with persona poetry.
Background
Firmly established in the classical comedies and tragedies of the ancient Greek dramatic tradition, the concept of the persona made a tangible leap from drama to poetry during the Victorian literary period. The device’s most notable champion of the era was Robert Browning, an accomplished poet and playwright who wrote a series of groundbreaking works commonly described by literary critics as “dramatic monologues.” Major examples of Browning’s dramatic monologues include “My Last Duchess” and “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” both of which present complex narratives relayed through the eyes of a fictional protagonist. Literary critics note that, while the novelty of Browning’s approach alienated many readers upon initial publication, his innovative fusion of the dramatic and poetic forms had a profound impact on the modernist movement that followed the Victorian Era.
During the modernist period, poets and authors consciously broke with established literary tradition, challenging convention by pushing the limits of form, genre, language, subject matter, theme, and other defining aspects of literature. As such, Browning’s verse-form experiments were highly appealing to leading modernists, including Pound and Eliot, who reveled in the creative possibilities personas offered to poets. Eliot in particular came to be viewed as a leading practitioner of the emerging genre of persona poetry, which he most famously captured in his acclaimed 1915 dramatic monologue “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Pound issued a collection of short-form persona poems in 1926 under the title Personae, which garnered critical acclaim.
As modernism continued to evolve beyond its early roots to become the defining literary movement of the early-to-mid twentieth century, subsequent generations of poets used persona devices to increasingly innovative and complex ends. Plath, for example, became well-known for using personas to explore her personal obsession with death, while poets such as Robert Hayden deployed personas as vehicles for social and political commentary. The Academy of American Poets recognizes the poem “Falling” by James Dickey as another notable use of the persona device. In “Falling,” Dickey adopts the persona of an omniscient presence accompanying a flight attendant who accidentally falls out of a moving airplane and plummets to her death.
Overview
Persona poetry has several defining elements, each of which has a near-universal presence in the genre. The first such element covers what commentators sometimes call an “assumed voice,” which usually takes the form of a fictional character who serves as a conduit for the poet’s own viewpoint. Second, the assumed voice nearly always engages the reader through first-person narration, relaying the events of the poem from their own point of view. In almost all cases, persona poems deliberately eschew the use of competing or alternative viewpoints, instead rooting their entire narratives firmly in the perspectives and experiences of their fictional protagonists. Finally, persona poems frequently have the quality of implying a direct dialogue between the speaker and the reader, suggesting that the adopted persona is consciously speaking to an audience.
While dramatic monologues represent a common expression of persona poetry, some poetic treatments of persona forms are more elusive and abstract in nature. For example, some persona poems deliberately withhold information about the poem’s speaker-narrator or the events they are describing, which often has the effect of actively engaging the reader in the poem by placing some of the responsibility for generating the work’s meaning upon the reader. Poets also use personas to generate irony, satire, or stream-of-consciousness explorations.
Poets sometimes adopt personas to write about subject matter with which they lack firsthand experience or to create a sense of distance between themselves and the topics discussed in the poem. Literary theorists and critics also note that personas give poets limitless freedom to explore concepts and ideas from diverse and unconventional viewpoints. In this sense, personas function as vehicles through which poets can engage with challenging and creative perspectives that, when managed successfully, can yield innovative results.
Personas additionally offer poets the opportunity to craft narratives and themes that comment on the human condition in ways that extend beyond their immediate selves. In this sense, poetic personas carry a set of functions like those attached to dramatic characters and the personal journeys they embark upon across the unfolding course of a story. Notably, persona poems often present self-contained narratives with distinct beginnings, middles, and ends and may use strategies and structural devices including exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolutions to imbue verse-based works with dramatic shapes and forms.
Bibliography
“About Persona.” The Poetry Archive, 2023, poetryarchive.org/glossary/persona/. Accessed 14 Nov. 2023.
“Creating Your Persona.” Purdue University, 2023, owl.purdue.edu/owl/general‗writing/writing‗style/style%20/creating‗personas.html. Accessed 14 Nov. 2023.
Moxley, Joseph M. “Persona.” Writing Commons, writingcommons.org/section/rhetoric/rhetorical-stance/persona/. Accessed 14 Nov. 2023.
Nordquist, Richard. “What Does ‘Persona’ Mean?” ThoughtCo, 4 Feb. 2019,www.thoughtco.com/persona-definition-1691613. Accessed 14 Nov. 2023.
“Persona.” Academy of American Poets, poets.org/glossary/persona-poem. Accessed 14 Nov. 2023.
“Persona.” Poetry Foundation, 2023, www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/persona. Accessed 14 Nov. 2023.
“What Is a Persona?” Oregon State University, 1 Apr. 2021, liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/wlf/what-persona. Accessed 14 Nov. 2023.
“What Is a Persona Poem? How to Write Persona Poetry.” MasterClass, 10 Feb. 2022, www.masterclass.com/articles/what-is-a-persona-poem. Accessed 14 Nov. 2023.