What Is a Persona? | Definition & Examples In Literature
- Melchior Antoine
- Jul 16
- 6 min read
Updated: Sep 18
A persona decides, to a large extent, the mood and tone and voice of a literary work. A persona is the voice through which a poem or story is told. In short, it is the narrating voice. The most common or traditional type of persona is the author. This is where the voice speaking is that of the poet or author writing the poem or story.
Now, in one sense, all personas belong to the poet’s voice. A male poet writing from the perspective of a woman or an anthropomorphic cat is kind of artificial. After all, we know that the woman is fictional and that cats can’t even speak or talk. Nonetheless, the choice of the narrating voice can determine the effect that the poem has on the reader.
So, a writer deciding on a narrative voice is often related to the intended effect on the audience. Personas in that regard also offer a challenge for readers in terms of close reading or literary analysis because you should be able to tell the difference between the perspective of teh author and that of the persona.
In some cases, there is no difference. In others, authors use a mask of irony and critical distance to separate their voice from that of the persona. Our first example is from Edgar Allan Poe’s “To Helen” (published in 1831):
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicéan barks of yore,
That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.
On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome.
The narrating voice in the poem is that of Edgar Allan Poe himself. He is portraying an ideal and romanticized version of Helen of Troy, the Greek beauty or “the face that launched a thousand ships,” which is a description of the legendary Trojan War that occurred after Helen abandoned her husband to run away with a Trojan Prince. He uses gorgeous sounds and imagery to do so.
In particular, “Nicéan barks of yore” produces its effects by relying on the mystery and romance of the beautiful-sounding and foreign Greek word "Nicéan" and the quaintness of archaic words from Shakespearean English, such as “barks” (which means boats) and “yore.” The poet is transporting us to an ancient time and place and uses the appropriate language to do so.
More than that, the rhyme, alliteration, and subtle onomatopoeia in the first stanza all contribute toward echoing the effect that it describes: the sound and feeling of a boat rocking to and fro over the gentle waves of a calm sea. The poet seems to be turning Helen into a symbol for the values and beauty of classical Greek and Roman culture and literature. He says, “thy classic face . . . have brought me home … to the glory that was Greece / And the grandeur that was Rome.”
The whole poem can be seen as an analogy or metaphor where the poet’s discovery of the classical world and his ability to value this world in terms of the role that it plays in his conceptualization of literary art was inspired by Helen. In this sense, Helen could be either an actual woman whose love inspires the poet or an idealized version of the classical Helen of Troy.
What about Helen herself? We know what she means to the poet. She has been objectified into a symbol that serves the purpose of a male poet. What does Helen feel about her own self in terms of her place in Ancient Greek history and literature?
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Seeing through the persona of Helen
To help answer these questions, it would help to look at another poem about Helen of Troy, this time written by a female poet— Hilda Doolittle also known as H.D. The poem in question is “Helen” (published in 1924):
All Greece hates
the still eyes in the white face,
the lustre as of olives
where she stands,
and the white hands.
All Greece reviles
the wan face when she smiles,
hating it deeper still
when it grows wan and white,
remembering past enchantments
and past ills.
Greece sees unmoved,
God’s daughter, born of love,
the beauty of cool feet
and slenderest knees,
could love indeed the maid,
only if she were laid,
white ash amid funereal cypresses.
The poem, deliberately or not, is in direct conversation with Poe’s poem. “Helen,” just like “To Helen,” is written with the author as the persona; however, the perspective being offered is Helen’s. Whereas Poe uses Helen as a symbol to represent his ideal of the Classical Greek and Roman World, H.D. offers us Helen as a woman. And she isn’t happy.
H.D. lets us know quite matter-of-factly that “All Greece hates” Helen. She abandoned her Greek husband Menelaus and ran away with a foreign prince, leading to destruction and ruin for Greece. Helen is hated while she yet has “still eyes in the white face” and as “she smiles.”
This means as long as she is alive and has the power to tell or represent her story, she will be despised by men. She will be worshipped and loved only as a goddess after she dies. Or as H.D. puts it “only if she were laid / white ash amid funeral cypresses.” In short, Helen has to die for her crime before being forgiven and turned into a metaphor for all things beautiful and classical, as Poe does in his poem.
In these two poems, the voice of the personas in both are the poets'. The difference in perspective depends entirely on their gender. Poe holds up Helen as an objectified version of all that is hallowed, lofty, and beautiful in Classical Greek-Roman culture. H.D. sees Helen as a woman who has been denied her individual personhood in life in favor of being held up as a sterile and hollow marble statue that can represent whatever men choose to make her symbolize after her death.
It’s as if H.D. is going back in time to Ancient Greece to present Helen’s perspective and to predict Poe’s poem, even if Poe wrote his almost 100 years before her. However, H.D. takes the idea even further in similar poems written from the perspective of women from classical Greece. Such poems include “At Ithaca,” where Penelope, wife of the Greek Hero Odysseus, presents a dramatic monologue about what it meant to wait for Odysseus.
Homer portrays her as a faithful and dutiful housewife, whereas H.D. depicts her as a woman whose loyalty to Odysseus is based on her sexual attraction to him over other lovers. Penelope doesn't stay true to Odysseus by not having other lovers, but by choosing Odysseus after going through a catalogue of lovers. For more on this close reading, you can check out my previous article: Modernism In Literature.
Another H.D. poem that is similar to “Helen,” but where the narrating voice is the persona of the figure herself, is “Demeter” (published in 1924). The poem is named after the Greek Goddess of Earth, Demeter:
Men, fires, feasts,
steps of temple, fore-stone, lintel,
step of white altar, fire and after-fire,
slaughter before,
fragment of burnt meat,
deep mystery, grapple of mind to reach
the tense thought,
power and wealth, purpose and prayer alike,
(men, fires, feasts, temple steps)—useless.
Here, the goddess is expressing discontent with being worshipped by men. Men are asking for her blessings and bounty in the form of “white altar” and “burnt meat,” but it is all “useless.” The repeated and hollow cycles of offering prayers and sacrifices are emphasized with the first line being repeated in parentheses in the last line of the poem stanza.
She will not inhabit the marble statues that are built in her honor. In the fourth stanza of the poem, she says:
for I will not stay in her breast
the great of limb,
though perfect the shell they have
fashioned me, these men!
In Helen, H.D. predicts that only her death will garner her the love and worship of men. Here, Demeter, who is already a Goddess and who has already experienced this death before being transformed into a deity, now resents this worship. The poems show a kind of strange, paradoxical game being played between men and society and women.
Women, when they fail to conform to the needs and demands of society, are socially condemned and shamed and have to undergo a death of the self. These women, in turn, when objectified into ideals of beauty and godhead after this "death," feel cheated and inadequate and are resentful for it. By using Demeter as the persona herself in the poem, H.D. can better express the frustration and resentment that women feel in being objectified into symbols serving others rather than themselves and being denied the chance to blossom into their own private sense of self.
Cite this EminentEdit article |
Antoine, M. (2025, July 16). What Is a Persona? | Definition & Examples In Literature. EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/persona |
