Persona poetry
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Persona poetry is poetry that is written from the perspective of a ' persona' that a poet creates, who is the speaker of the poem. Dramatic monologues are a type of persona poem, because "as they must create a character, necessarily create a persona". The editors of ''A Face to Meet the Faces: The Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry'' state that “The literary tradition of persona, of writing poems in voices or from perspectives other than the poet's own, is ancient in origin and contemporary in practice.” Furthermore, a wide range of characters are created in persona poems from a variety of sources, including, "popular culture, history, the Bible, literature, mythology, newspaper clippings, legends, fairy tales, and comic books.”
Stock character A stock character, also known as a character archetype, is a fictional character in a work of art such as a novel, play, or a film whom audiences recognize from frequent recurrences in a particular literary tradition. There is a wide range of st ...
s of pantomime and ''
commedia dell'arte (; ; ) was an early form of professional theatre, originating from Italian theatre, that was popular throughout Europe between the 16th and 18th centuries. It was formerly called Italian comedy in English and is also known as , , and . Charact ...
,'' such as Pierrot, have been revived by twentieth century poets such as
T. S. Eliot Thomas Stearns Eliot (26 September 18884 January 1965) was a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and editor.Bush, Ronald. "T. S. Eliot's Life and Career", in John A Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (eds), ''American National Biogr ...
and Giannina Braschi, and by singer-songwriters such as David Bowie. Modernist poets
Ezra Pound Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a Fascism, fascist collaborator in Italy during World War II. His works ...
, Fernando Pessoa,
Rainer Maria Rilke René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926), shortened to Rainer Maria Rilke (), was an Austrian poet and novelist. He has been acclaimed as an idiosyncratic and expressive poet, and is widely recogni ...
, and confessional poet Sylvia Plath also wrote a personae poems.


Origins and development

See also Persona (psychology) The word persona is derived from Latin, where it originally referred to a theatrical mask. While "the dramatic monologue as a poetic form achieved its first era of distinction in the work of Victorian poet
Robert Browning Robert Browning (7 May 1812 – 12 December 1889) was an English poet and playwright whose dramatic monologues put him high among the Victorian poets. He was noted for irony, characterization, dark humour, social commentary, historical settings ...
", there were precursors in
Classical literature Classics or classical studies is the study of classical antiquity. In the Western world, classics traditionally refers to the study of Classical Greek and Roman literature and their related original languages, Ancient Greek and Latin. Classics ...
, including that of
China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...
."Persona". Academy of American Poets
/ref> The editors of ''Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry'' explains that the “wide-ranging and far-reaching” function of the persona poem in the literary tradition, has operated from an “early” point in history to orally relay the chronicles of significant "cultural and historical events". The persona poem evolved further in the twentieth century when the term 'persona' became popularised in psychology and anthropology by theorists in these fields. For Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, persona was the social face the individual presented to the world: "a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and on the other to conceal the true nature of the individual".


Lyrical subject

The lyrical subject (lyrical speaker or lyrical I) is the voice, or person narrating the words of a poem or other
lyrical Lyrical may refer to: *Lyrics, or words in songs *Lyrical dance, a style of dancing *Emotional, expressing strong feelings *Lyric poetry, poetry that expresses a subjective, personal point of view *Lyric video A music video is a video of variab ...
work. The lyrical subject is a conventional literary figure, historically associated with the author, although it is not necessarily the author who speaks for themselves in the subject. The lyrical subject may be an anonymous, non-personal, or stand-alone entity; the author as a subject; the author's persona or some other character appearing and participating within the story of a poem (an example would be the speaker of " The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe – a lonely man who misses his lost love Leonor, who is not to be identified with Edgar Allan Poe).


Confessional poetry

Confessional poetry is a style of poetry that emerged in the United States during the 1950s, that has been described as poetry of the personal or "I", focusing on extreme moments of individual experience, the psyche, and personal trauma, including previously and occasionally still taboo matters such as
mental illness A mental disorder, also referred to as a mental illness or psychiatric disorder, is a behavioral or mental pattern that causes significant distress or impairment of personal functioning. Such features may be persistent, relapsing and remitti ...
, sexuality, and
suicide Suicide is the act of intentionally causing one's own death. Mental disorders (including depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, personality disorders, anxiety disorders), physical disorders (such as chronic fatigue syndrome), and s ...
, often set in relation to broader social themes. It is sometimes also described as a form of
Postmodernism Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or Rhetorical modes, mode of discourseNuyen, A.T., 1992. The Role of Rhetorical Devices in Postmodernist Discourse. Philosophy & Rhetoric, pp.183–194. characterized by philosophical skepticism, skepticis ...
. Irving Howe argues that a "confessional poem would seem to be one in which the writer speaks to the reader, telling him, without the mediating presence of imagined event or persona, something about his life".


Themes and interpretation

Poet Rebecca Hazelton explains that the persona poem permits "a great deal of control over the distance between a speaker and the audience", and that "the persona poem can accommodate a variety of speakers and dramatic situations". Hazelton states that the persona poem poses a “puzzle”, because while it is an “artifice” it is also a “very intimate form of poetry”. The writer is able to speak directly to the reader in a persona poem, and "forges an almost interpersonal relationship with them”. Timothy Steele explains that a distinct thematic feature of the persona poem is its ability for the poet to “measure personal experience against a comprehensive type”, allowing the poem to advance from “the general to the particular”. The poet achieves this through presenting an archetype at the poem’s beginning, and cultivating the ideas, feelings, and issues surrounding this archetype over the course of the poem’s development. Persona poetry, using dramatic monologues, has also been used to convey themes of racial tension. Ryan Sharp states that the 2000s have seen a sharp rise in Black American poets using the persona, interrogating poetic material in the Archive, such as Rita Dove’s Rosa Parks in ''
On the Bus with Rosa Parks ''On the Bus with Rosa Parks'' is a book of poems by Rita Dove. Rosa Parks was an American activist in the civil rights movement best known for her pivotal role in the Montgomery bus boycott. The United States Congress has called her "the first ...
'' (1999). Sharpe notes that the majority of the poems in ''The Big Smoke'' by
Adrian Matejka Adrian Matejka is an American poet. He was the Indiana State Poet Laureate, poet laureate of Indiana for the 2018–2019 term. Since May 2022, he has been the editor of ''Poetry (magazine), Poetry'' magazine. Life Born in Nuremberg, Germany, ...
(2013), about Jack Johnson — the first African American to claim the title of world heavyweight champion – "are 'persona' poems: poetic monologues written in Johnson’s voice". Sharp explains that contemporary black historical persona poetry functions as a reaction against “dehumanised black bodies and silenced black voices”. Further, black persona poetry is a means to demonstrate past and current micro and macro-aggressions against African-Americans. African-American poets are “taking on the voices of infamous folk figures in order to reimagine and expand archival and contemporary notions of blackness.” The personae of black folk heroes has allowed poets to fictively re-imagine “new, more complex narratives for them which better project the intersubjective black ‘soul’.”


Notable works


Classical Chinese poetry

The use of a poetic persona is often encountered in Classical Chinese poetry, in which the author writes a poem from the viewpoint of some other person (or type of person). Often these persona types were quite conventional, such as the lonely wife left behind at home, the junior concubine ignored and sequestered in the imperial harem, or the soldier sent off to fight and die beyond the remote frontier. Part of the legacy associated with '' fu poetry'' ((206 BCE – CE 220)) is its use as a form of sociopolitical protest, such as the theme of the loyal minister who has been unjustly exiled by the ruler or those in power at the court, rather than receiving the promotion and respect which he truly deserves. In the '' Verses of Chu'', one of the works attributed to Qu Yuan is the " Li Sao", which is one of the earliest known works in this tradition, both as ancestral to the ''fu'' as well as its incorporation of political criticism as a theme of poetry. The theme of unjust exile is related to the development of '' Xiaoxiang poetry'', or the poetry stylistically or thematically based upon lamenting the unjust exile of the poet, either directly, or allegorically through the use of the persona of a friend or historical figure (a safer course in the case of a poet-official who might be punished for any too blatant criticism of the current emperor).


Roman poetry

The ''
Heroides The ''Heroides'' (''The Heroines''), or ''Epistulae Heroidum'' (''Letters of Heroines''), is a collection of fifteen epistolary Epistolary means "in the form of a letter or letters", and may refer to: * Epistolary ( la, epistolarium), a Christi ...
'' are fifteen
epistolary Epistolary means "in the form of a letter or letters", and may refer to: * Epistolary ( la, epistolarium), a Christian liturgical book containing set readings for church services from the New Testament Epistles * Epistolary novel * Epistolary poem ...
poems composed by Ovid (43 BCE – 17/18 CE) in Latin elegiac couplets and presented as though written by a selection of aggrieved heroines of Greek and Roman mythology in address to their heroic lovers who have in some way mistreated, neglected, or abandoned them. In the third book of his ''
Ars Amatoria The ''Ars amatoria'' ( en, The Art of Love) is an instructional elegy series in three books by the ancient Roman poet Ovid. It was written in 2 AD. Background Book one of ''Ars amatoria'' was written to show a man how to find a woman. In book two ...
'', Ovid argues that in writing these fictional epistolary poems in the personae of famous heroines, rather than from a first-person perspective, he created an entirely new literary genre. The full extent of Ovid's originality in this matter has been a point of scholarly contention Consensus concedes to Ovid the lion's share of the credit in the thorough exploration of what was then a highly innovative poetic form.


English language poetry

Robert Browning's dramatic monologue " My Last Duchess" (1842) typifies the formalistic qualities of the persona poem: dramatic tension, manipulating the reader experience, and removing the distance between speaker and reader. More recently T. S. Eliot's 1915 ' The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock' was influential on the persona poem. "Prufrock" is a
dramatic Dramatic may refer to: * Drama, a literary form involving parts for actors * Dramatic, a voice type classification in European classical music, describing a specific vocal weight and range at the lower end of a given voice part * Dramatic soprano, ...
interior monologue of an urban man, stricken with feelings of isolation and an incapability for decisive action that is said "to epitomize frustration and impotence of the modern individual".
Ezra Pound Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a Fascism, fascist collaborator in Italy during World War II. His works ...
was an admirer of Browning and he frequently used masks or personae (''Personae'' is the title of collection of shorter poems by him). ::Rather than the poem representing the voice of the author, as in much lyric poetry, the speaker in Pound’s persona poems is a made-up character with whom Pound did not completely identify. This allowed Pound to be satiric, even sarcastic, not only about the subject of the poems but about their speaker, although he sometimes appears to share the sentiments of the poem’s persona, making for an interesting ambiguity. Pound "set an example for later modernists to follow; two examples are "Maximus, to himself" by Charles Olson and "Linnaeus in Lapland" by Lorine Niedecker. The persona poem can encompass the imagined perspective of voices that are not human, as in Roman poet Ovid's ''
Heroides The ''Heroides'' (''The Heroines''), or ''Epistulae Heroidum'' (''Letters of Heroines''), is a collection of fifteen epistolary Epistolary means "in the form of a letter or letters", and may refer to: * Epistolary ( la, epistolarium), a Christi ...
'' collection of epistolary poems mentioned above. In Tennyson's dramatic monologue " Tithonus", Tithonus addressing his consort Eos, the goddess of the dawn. Similarly Margaret Atwood's 'Siren Song' (1974) is narrated from the voice of a mythical creature, a
siren Siren or sirens may refer to: Common meanings * Siren (alarm), a loud acoustic alarm used to alert people to emergencies * Siren (mythology), an enchanting but dangerous monster in Greek mythology Places * Siren (town), Wisconsin * Siren, Wisco ...
. "Ellen West" (1977) by American poet Frank Bidart (b. 1939) is another celebrated example, drawn from the life of Ellen West (1888-1921).


Portuguese poetry

The modernist poet Fernando Pessoa created over 72 personae and heteronyms. Literary
alter ego An alter ego (Latin for "other I", " doppelgänger") means an alternate self, which is believed to be distinct from a person's normal or true original personality. Finding one's alter ego will require finding one's other self, one with a differen ...
s were popular among early twentieth-century poets. For example,
Ezra Pound Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a Fascism, fascist collaborator in Italy during World War II. His works ...
had Mauberley,
Rilke René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926), shortened to Rainer Maria Rilke (), was an Austrian poet and novelist. He has been acclaimed as an idiosyncratic and expressive poet, and is widely recogni ...
had Malte Laurids Brigge, and Valéry had Monsieur Teste. However, no other poet, according to the Academy of American Poets, took an alter ego as far as Pessoa, who assigned a biography, psychology, politics, aesthetics, religion, and physique to each persona. Pessoa's most famous personae are: Alberto Caeiro, a self-taught poet who wrote in free verse; Ricardo Reis, a physician who wrote odes influenced by Horace; and Álvaro de Campos, a naval engineer influenced by poet Walt Whitman and the
Italian Futurists Futurism ( it, Futurismo, link=no) was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy, and to a lesser extent in other countries, in the early 20th century. It emphasized dynamism, speed, technology, youth, violence, and objects suc ...
. Pessoa also created the personae of a philosopher and sociologist António Mora, an essayist Baron of Teive, an astrologer Raphael Baldaya, and many others, for a total of at least 72 heteronyms.


Spanish language poetry

Giannina Braschi's ''Empire of Dreams'' (1988) is a
Postmodern Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourseNuyen, A.T., 1992. The Role of Rhetorical Devices in Postmodernist Discourse. Philosophy & Rhetoric, pp.183–194. characterized by skepticism toward the " grand narratives" of moderni ...
work of epic poetry that pays homage to the Commedia dell'Arte's. In the second part of ''Empire of Dreams'', entitled "La Comedia Profana," (1985) clowns, buffoons, harlequins, witches,
shepherd A shepherd or sheepherder is a person who tends, herds, feeds, or guards flocks of sheep. ''Shepherd'' derives from Old English ''sceaphierde (''sceap'' 'sheep' + ''hierde'' 'herder'). ''Shepherding is one of the world's oldest occupations, i ...
s, and fortune tellers give first-person narratives of their adventures in modern day New York City. These
stock character A stock character, also known as a character archetype, is a fictional character in a work of art such as a novel, play, or a film whom audiences recognize from frequent recurrences in a particular literary tradition. There is a wide range of st ...
s take over the city streets, stores, and tourist attractions, such as Macy’s, the
Empire State Building The Empire State Building is a 102-story Art Deco skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. The building was designed by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon and built from 1930 to 1931. Its name is derived from "Empire State", the nickname of the st ...
, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Central Park. There are many absurd vignettes, such as traffic jams caused by the flocks of sheep that are grazing on 5th Avenue. Braschi's dramatic poems give a comedic twist to the genre of the
Spanish Golden Age The Spanish Golden Age ( es, Siglo de Oro, links=no , "Golden Century") is a period of flourishing in arts and literature in Spain, coinciding with the political rise of the Spanish Empire under the Catholic Monarchs of Spain and the Spanish H ...
of
Pastoral poetry A pastoral lifestyle is that of shepherds herding livestock around open areas of land according to seasons and the changing availability of water and pasture. It lends its name to a genre of literature, art, and music (pastorale) that depicts ...


Performance

Persona poetry has developed further in the twenty-first century in the form of rap and other popular music, as well as through more traditional poetry. Celebrity figures such as rapper
Snoop Dogg Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr. (born October 20, 1971), known professionally as Snoop Dogg (previously Snoop Doggy Dogg and briefly Snoop Lion), is an American rapper. His fame dates back to 1992 when he featured on Dr. Dre's debut solo single, " ...
have constructed alter-egos through which to write and perform songs, and through this Snoop Dogg persona is able to portray “a cool, yet violent man” to deliver “theatrically exaggerated threats.” Some similar examples include, Nicki Minaj's 'Roman Zolanski' and Eminem's 'Slim Shady'. Poetry slams are another mode through which persona poetry has continued into the twenty-first century, as the spoken word allows for a performative experience for audiences. Poets are able to use gesture, voice, and other forms of body language for delivery.
Minal Hajratwala Minal Hajratwala (born 1971) is a writer, performer, poet, and queer activist of Indian descent. She was born in 1971 in San Francisco, California, US, and was raised in New Zealand and suburban Michigan. She is a graduate of Stanford University. ...
has explained her use of persona as resulting from her different identities, including "
Gujarati Gujarati may refer to: * something of, from, or related to Gujarat, a state of India * Gujarati people, the major ethnic group of Gujarat * Gujarati language, the Indo-Aryan language spoken by them * Gujarati languages, the Western Indo-Aryan sub- ...
, queer, diasporan, San Franciscan, poet, performer, writing-coach, editor, recovering journalist, and more.” Hajratwala claims that this hybrid postmodern identity is conducive to employing the persona to either merge these identities into one cohesive speaker, or express using multiple personae.


See also

* Characterization * Interior Monologue * Lyric Poetry *
Rudy Ray Moore Rudolph Frank Moore (March 17, 1927October 19, 2008), known as Rudy Ray Moore, was an American comedian, singer, actor, and film producer.Narrative poetry *
Performance Poetry Performance poetry is a broad term, encompassing a variety of styles and genres. In brief, it is poetry that is specifically composed for or during a performance before an audience. During the 1980s, the term came into popular usage to describe p ...
* Pierrot *
The Personal Heresy ''The Personal Heresy'' is a series of articles, three each by C.S. Lewis and E. M. W. (Eustace Mandeville Wetenhall) Tillyard, first published on 27 April 1939 by Oxford University Press and later reprinted, also by Oxford University Press, ...
* Stream-of-consciousness * Verse drama and dramatic verse *
Writer's voice In literature, writing style is the manner of expressing thought in language characteristic of an individual, period, school, or nation. As Bryan Ray notes, however, style is a broader concern, one that can describe "readers' relationships with, t ...


External links


Timothy Steele, "From Persona Poem to Person Poem: Edgar Bowers' "Mary". "How Shall a Generation Know Its Story": The Edgar Bowers Conference and Exhibition, April 11, 2003, UCLA.


References

{{Reflist Poetic devices Poetic forms Poetry Genres of poetry