Persona poetry

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 characters of pantomime and commedia dell'arte, such as Pierrot, have been revived by twentieth century poets such as T. S. Eliot and Giannina Braschi, and by singer-songwriters such as David Bowie. Modernist poets Ezra Pound, Fernando Pessoa, Rainer Maria Rilke, and confessional poet Sylvia Plath also wrote a personae poems. 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", there were precursors in Classical literature, including that of China. 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".