ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Pessoa's and Yeats's incorporation of principles from the dramatic genre into their discourses on poetry and their poetic practices, in particular their use of personae. It traces the development of the poets' evolving dramatic poetics through the overarching metaphor of construction in their poetry, which symbolically equates the process of dramatic self-othering to a mythopoeic creative act. As Yeats appears to have regarded the process of poetic 'dramatization', as he called it, principally as a strategy of self-representation, Pessoa envisaged it as a self-effacing strategy, as his preferred term 'depersonalization' suggests. Pessoa's and Yeats's strategies of self-othering reinstate the role of the poet as architect of his own poetic universe. Pessoa's heteronymy and Yeats's doctrine of the mask were their respective solutions to the breakdown of the homogenous lyric voice by disseminating it into multifaceted voices, capable of conveying the heterogeneous and fluid realities of the modern self and world.
