ABSTRACT
The persona is less often a mask than it is the human face, as it were, of the poetic text, and a deeper understanding of the way persona works in individual poems, as well as how it works generally, provides an insight into the most human elements of the art form. The postmodern period saw an attempt to reduce the primary persona to the linguistic sign ‘I’, seeing it as an expression of an abstract, free-floating selfhood or as a self-reflexive linguistic act. This chapter shows that this is not always the case, and that persona can be the most significant concretisation of poetry.
