Persona poetry

Main article: Persona

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".[1]

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."[2] 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."[2]

Stock characters of pantomime and commedia dell'arte, such as Pierrot, have been revived by twentieth century poets such as T. S. Eliot[3] and Giannina Braschi,[4] and by singer-songwriters such as David Bowie.[5] Modernist poets Ezra Pound,[6] Fernando Pessoa,[7] Rainer Maria Rilke,[8] and confessional poet Sylvia Plath[9] also wrote a personae poems.[10]

  1. ^ "About persona", Poetry Archive
  2. ^ a b Brown, Stacey Lynn; de la Paz, Oliver (2012). A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry. The University of Akron Press. ISBN 978-1-937378-28-8.
  3. ^ "The form in which I began to write, in 1908 or 1909, was directly drawn from the study of Laforgue ...": Eliot, in his Introduction to the Selected Poems of Ezra Pound; cited in Storey, Pierrot: a critical history, p. 156.
  4. ^ Ostriker, Alicia (1994). Empire of Dreams, Introduction. O'Dwyer, Tess. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-05795-4. OCLC 29703241.
  5. ^ Jean Rook, "Waiting for Bowie and finding a genius who insists he's really a clown" Daily Express 5 May 1976
  6. ^ "Ezra Pound". Poetry Foundation. 2020-10-17. Retrieved 2020-10-18.
  7. ^ Poets, Academy of American. "About Fernando Pessoa | Academy of American Poets". poets.org. Retrieved 2020-10-18. No one took their alter ego as far as Pessoa, who gave up his own life to confer quasi-real substance on the poets he designated at heteronyms, giving each a personal biography, psychology, politics, aesthetics, religion, and physique.
  8. ^ Siegel, Lee (1996-04-01). "To Work is to Live Without Dying". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2020-10-18.
  9. ^ Poets, Academy of American. "Persona poem | Academy of American Poets". poets.org. Retrieved 2020-10-18.
  10. ^ Cite error: The named reference :7 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).