The use of persona as a literary device is deeply embedded in poetry and poetic history in that poets of many cultures and over many centuries have often chosen to use persona in their works.(1–5) Persona in poetry is considered to be the assumed identity or fictional “I” a poet uses as the “speaker” in a poem.(6) As an assumed identity or fictional “I”, it refers to the poetic voice a writer invents and uses as the speaker or teller of the stories in their poems.(5) The use of persona as an assumed identity is quite common in first-person and lyric poetry.(7) Poet’s may choose to speak from behind a persona because they know that not every event or situation they present in a poem may be factually or chronologically precise, yet the things they present in their poems are still drawn from their own cumulative life experience and knowledge.

Persona can also refer to a totally invented fictional character a poet uses in a poem as a mask or alter-ego behind which to write,(7) such as becoming an historical figure, a mythological god, a little girl in a candy store, or some other invented character. Indeed, the word persona comes from a Latin word that means “the mask of an actor”;(8) and, as with an actor, the poet is putting on an identity other than their own to narrate the poem.(9) When a poet uses an invented character, they use their imagination to enter the world of another, to become the other character, think what they think, do what they do, feel like they feel, inventing the character’s world and illustrating it in a rich first-person narrative as they tell the story.(10) Whereas, when a poet uses an assumed identity or fictional “I”, they use it as a poetic voice behind which they remain more neutral and detached from the speaker in the poem. This gives them the freedom to invent and embellish situations and plot even though the details and particulars of the experiences are true and real.

On the other hand, a great many poets still write their poetry as themselves, giving personal accounts (often called confessional poetry) or writing autobiographically.(11–14) Since it is clear that poetry can be, and is written by both methods, when we read a poem we need to ascertain whether a poet is using their own voice and giving a personal account or if they are speaking as a persona. Because the use of persona is common, when reading a poem written in the first-person, we cannot assume that the poet who wrote the poem is the same as the person narrating the poem.(3) A good question to ask ourselves when reading a poem is, “Who is the speaker?”(5) If there are no notes or commentary that came with the poem, we may be unable to ascertain whether it is the poet speaking in the poem or a persona.

The vast majority of poems will be clear from the poem itself whether the thing presented is a strict and direct personal or autobiographical relating of life events by the poet writing; or whether the thing presented is a sketch drawn from the poet’s personal cumulative life experience and knowledge; or whether the thing presented is pure fiction imagined by the poet. No matter what, it is the poet’s life events, personal experience, and knowledge that is behind and in the poem, whether directly or by persona. Because the vast majority of poems will be clear in and of themselves, nothing need be done in any notes or footnotes to clarify the speaker, it is self-evident.

If it is not clear from the poem itself whether it is spoken as a personal, autobiographical account by the poet or if the speaker in the poem is a persona, we can gather clues from the poem. We can think about a poem and ask ourselves such questions as, Did James Joyce really lay on the parlor floor every day just watching her door?(15) Did Robert Frost really stop by those exact woods on that one snowy evening or was it a general recollection of memories (as he was noted to have later claimed), or did Billy Collins actually visit his parents’ graves to ask them what they thought of his new glasses?(16)

The use of a persona has not been without its critics. One critic, Galway Kinnell, maintained that the persona poem was too disposable, too easy to jettison as a construct.(3) Romantic Age poets argued that poets should be their authentic selves when speaking in the first person, but Modernist poets rejected this notion and published many books and poems that cultivated fictitious personae and spoke from a first-person perspective in a neutral voice, not as the poet.(3)

So while critics regard the use of persona as being disingenuous and inauthentic, proponents argue that real, authentic, genuine experiences can be relayed via the use of a persona as there is an overlap of a poet’s own real and genuine experiences being expressed through the perspective of the persona.(6, 8, 10, 15–16) A persona doesn’t replace the authenticity of a poet, it merely gives the poet a lens of perspective in which to relay that authenticity.

A poet is an artist and an artist uses imagination to make art, to paint pictures of real things even if the whole scene itself is not real. A painter may imagine a barn set amidst fields of corn, and so paints the scene. Everything that is portrayed in the scene is real and true, the corn is real, the trees, the sun, mountains, buildings, all painted according to the painter’s personal experience and memory of these things; yet that barn in the painting and those fields do not really exist because the painter invented the setting, it was a scene, a picture in their imagination based on their cumulative knowledge and experience of reality.

Do we then say that the painting of the barn in the fields of corn is inauthentic because that barn does not really exist? No we don’t. So too, poets use their artistic imaginations to put themselves into scenes and settings that they invent, yet the particulars and details are true events and experiences in their lives.(10) That doesn’t make the experiences conveyed any less real than that image of the bush that the painter painted next to the door of the barn in their painting even though that barn doesn’t even really exist.

One poet, Kim Dower, in her article Poetry as Fiction even asked the question “Who started the rumor that poems are autobiographical?”(16) Another poet laureate, Pauletta Hansel, noted, “I have long been drawn to the persona poem. As a young woman writer, I used a character as a loose mask (in Latin, personae) through which to speak truths I was otherwise reluctant to say.”(17)

A poet can present a persona’s thoughts and experiences in a poem in such a manner that the reader recognizes a high degree of identification between the speaker and the poet’s own experiences.(4) As Hansel notes, whether it uses persona or not, the voice in any poem is, to some degree, the voice of the poet anyway, which is always behind everything in the poem.(17)

Many professors and critics teach that a reader should always view the person speaking in a poem as a persona and call them the “speaker”, and not the poet, when talking or writing about the poem.(8, 16–17) However, since the practice and writing of personal narratives and confessional poetry has become so popular, it might be prudent for poets who use a persona to clarify that in the rare case where it is not clear by the poem itself. Even so, as readers, when it is not absolutely clear that a poem is a personal account by the poet who wrote it, the safest assumption is that it is a persona until we know better.

Some of the characteristics of a persona poem are that it uses an assumed voice or neutral voice, not that of the poet; it is given in direct address similar to a dramatic monologue and thus may be self-referential; and it uses the first-person perspective.(18) Because the second two characteristics (direct address and in first person) are the same as in personal poetry, many readers falsely presume that most, if not all poems in the first-person are personal and autobiographical. This is not true.

Take Emily Dickinson, for instance. Many historians and critics of the past built an autobiographical background for her out of her poetry and so she came to be viewed as some enigmatic mythical and mystical creature because of it. However, many of her poems, which were once commonly regarded as being autobiographical, have been shown by recent research and study to be personae. Much of the biographical background that we have inherited about Dickinson was fabricated out of her poetry and not real events in her life.(19) It is now very clear from a closer study of her works and greater knowledge of her real background that she used multiple personae for the majority of her poems.(19) Yet, most people today still think that Dickinson wrote confessional and autobiographical poetry when it simply isn’t true.

Confessional and personal poetry (also called autobiographical poetry) began its rise in the 1950s and 1960s with the poetry of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and W. D. Snodgrass.(11) It was Lowell’s book, Life Studies, that initiated the movement(12) and impacted the American poetry scene.(11) Lowell’s book was a highly personal account of his life and familial ties which had great influence on Plath and Sexton who were both students of Lowell.(11)

These poets shockingly began to reveal their private lives and private experiences with death, abuse, trauma, depression, and relationships in an autobiographical manner.(13) Sexton was especially interested in the psychological aspect of poetry since it was her therapist who first encouraged her to write it.(11) It’s also important to understand that the reason these personal confessional-autobiographical poems gained such popularity is because their works were not just mundane biographical and therapeutic sketches on paper. Rather, these poets maintained a high level of compositional skill in their poetry with careful attention to the use of prosody.(11) They wrote excellent poetry that got attention and helped their work gain prominence.

Criticisms rose against these “autobiographical poets” who didn’t use personas in their poetry. One leading critic was Ted Kooser, who noted his suspicion about the efforts of some poets to fictionalize themselves and only present an aura of truth, noting that he felt betrayed by poems that pretend to be the poet narrating from autobiographical experience but who were still adding to or fictionalizing aspects of their stories.(20) He spoke of the unwritten contract that poets have with readers that they speak from the perspective of personas where settings and events may be fictionalized at times but the truths and experiences are real.(20)

Billy Collins noted that for a poet to write of his own life would not only be self-indulgent but of no value to an audience interested in its own edification, not in the secrets of a poet’s past.(20) The point these critics made was that maybe the tree didn’t fall through the roof the day after grandma died, but grandma did die, and a tree did fall through the roof, and a poet can combine these experiences in a poem for poetic effect, which fictionalizes chronology and setting, but doesn’t change the imagery and impact and truth of the particulars of the experiences portrayed.

The debate of the use of assumed identity as a persona in poetry versus personal, autobiographical poetry will continue among scholars, poets, and critics. No matter the debate, we are now in a time in poetic history where both persona poetry and autobiographical poetry are equally practiced and written. We should accept that. Why not celebrate the diversity in both practices and get the best from both types? Nonetheless, we should also recognize that many readers are expecting first-person poems to actually be the poet speaking from autobiographical personal experience. Therefore, in the rare cases where a persona is used but it might not be clear that it is not the poet speaking, it might be prudent for a poet to make that clear for the reader’s sake and to avoid misunderstandings. ◊ ◊ ◊

Reference List

1. Academy of American Poets. (2023). Persona (Glossary entry). Poets.org Glossary. Available at https://poets.org/glossary/persona-poem

2. Baldwin, Emma. (2020). First Person Point of View. (Digital Article) Poem Analysis, 16 October 2020. (Online writing resource). Available at https://poemanalysis.com/literary-device/first-person-point-of-view/

3. Frazier, Jane V. Dr. (2018). Persona in Poetry. Title III Professional Development Reports. 14.
https://bluetigercommons.lincolnu.edu/training-report/14

4. Greene, R., Cushman, S., Cavanagh, C., Ramazani, J., Rouzer, P., Feinsod, H., … & Slessarev, A. (Eds.). (2012). Persona, (Entry). In The Princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics. Princeton University Press. 900–901.

5. Vyatka Humanitarian Gymnasium. (n.d.). Persona and Tone. (Database entry). Kirov Regional State General Educational Autonomous Institution. Available at https://vhg.ru/poetry/npmpt.htm

6. Wallace, John. (2017). Persona. (PDF) In Toils of Testing (Database). Available at http://www.toilsoftesting.info/assets/personae.pdf

7. Prudchenko, Kate. (n.d.). What is Characterization in Poetry?. Pen & the Pad (Website). Available at https://penandthepad.com/characterization-poetry-193html

8. Baldwin, Emma. (2020). Persona. (Digital Article). Poem Analysis 19 June 2020. (Online writing resource). Available at https://poemanalysis.com/literary-device/persona/

9. Erickson, Susan J. (2016). The Many Faces of Persona Poems. Guest Post selected by Brewer, Robert Lee (Ed.), 19 January 2016. Writer’s Digest Magazine.

10. Flyingwords. (n.d.). Persona Poetry. Flyingwords Resources for Writers. Available at http://www.flyingwords.com/persona-poetry.html

11. Academy of American Poets. (2014). A Brief Guide to Confessional Poetry. Poets.org. Available at https://poets.org/text/brief-guide-confessional-poetry

12. Ian Hamilton. (1994). A Biographer’s Misgivings. Walking Possession, Essays & Reviews 1968–1993. Addison-Wesley. p 289.

13. Hoffman, Steven K. (1978). Impersonal Personalism: The Making of a Confessional Poetic. ELH. 45(4)(Winter): 687–709.

14. Ammons, A. R. (1970). Essay on Poetics. The Hudson Review, 23(3), 425–448.

15. Dempsy, Kate. 2012. The “I” Persona in Poetry. (Digital article). Writing.ie (Website blog). Available at https://www.writing.ie/guest-blogs/the-i-persona-in-poetry/

16. Dower, Kim. 2013. Poetry as Fiction. Publishers Weekly Magazine. Volume 260 Issue 36 09/09/2013.

17. Hansel, Pauletta. 2016. The Self Not Mine but Ours: An Exploration of Persona Poetry. (Digital Article). The Poet’s Craft, 2 February 2016. Available at https://paulettahansel.wordpress.com/2016/02/02/the-self-not-mine-but-ours-an-exploration-of-persona-poetry/

18. MasterClass. 2022. What Is a Persona Poem? How to Write Persona Poetry. (Digital Article). MasterClass Articles. Writing, 10 February 2022. Available at https://www.masterclass.com/articles/what-is-a-persona-poem

19. Todd, J. E. (1965). Emily Dickinson’s use of the persona. The University of Wisconsin-Madison.

20. Byrne, Edward. (2002). Examining the Poetry of Confession and Autobiography: After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography. Valparaiso Poetry Review: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, Vol 4(1); Fall/Winter 2002–2003.