Persona - in Literature

In Literature

In literature the term has become associated with the work of two modern poets, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. They understood the term slightly differently and derived its use and meaning from different traditions. Eliot had taken over and developed Laforgue's ironic "I", whereas Pound worked from Robert Browning's dramatic monologues. Eliot's personae were Prufrock and Sweeney, Pound's were Cino, Bertran de Born, Propertius, and Mauberley. Whereas Eliot used "masks" to distance himself from aspects of modern life which he found degrading and repulsive, Pound's personae were poets and could be considered in good part alter-egos who are to be dissociated from "characters" like Malatesta, John Adam, Confucius, or Thomas Jefferson that we find in Pound's later poetry, The Cantos. For Pound, the personae were a way of working through a specific poetic problem. In this sense, the persona is a transparent mask, wearing the traits of two poets and responding to two situations, old and new, which are similar and overlapping.

In Homage to Sextus Propertius, for example, Pound "translated" parts of Propertius's elegies and by means of various modernizations of diction, drew attention to parallelisms existing between Propertius's situation and Pound's own, especially the pressures of living in an empire at war and Pound's desire to cease writing shorter lyrical poems and start on longer epic structures. Pound at that time (1917) had written his first three Cantos but was doubtful of their value. In writing the Homage he worked through his anxieties of whether the epic was compatible with modernity or worth writing at all, given the political and social statement of the genre. Pound at that time had no political education, which he would start to acquire only after the end of WWI with C.H. Douglas and A.R. Orage in the offices of The New Age.

Assuming personae were a Greek and Roman tradition that was abandoned during the Medieval period. Instead of wearing masks the actors assumed their characters' personality. As part of a teaching strategy, teachers in the US state Iowa have adopted this method to teach their students Shakespeare. The students were asked to become the character to reduce their alienation from the text and to assist them to reflect on the character's beliefs, values and motivations. This experiment achieved a few goals: 1) The students are able to connect to the concepts and context. 2) They are able to construct meaning. 3) Allows students to choose whether to like or dislike Shakespearean text.