from A Glossary of Literary Terms, 4th edition

M. H. Abrams

"Persona" was the Latin word for the "mask" used by actors in the classical theater. . . . In recent literary discussion "persona" is often applied to the first-person narrator, the "I," of a narrative poem or novel, or the lyric speaker whose voice we listen to in a lyric poem. Examples of personae [include] the visionary first-person narrator of Milton's Paradise Lost (who in the opening passages of various books discourses at some length about himself). . . . By calling [such] speakers "personae" . . . we stress the fact that they are all part of the fiction, characters invented for a particular artistic purpose. That the "I" . . . is not the author as he exists in his everyday life is obvious enough in the case of Swift's Gulliver and Browning's Duke [in his narrative poem "My Last Duchess"], less obvious in the case of Milton, . . . and does not seem obvious at all to an unsophisticated reader of the lyric poems of Wordsworth and Keats, in which we seem invited to identify the speaker with the poet himself.

Stodgy definitions of this sort tend to piss me off. They feel designed to insult the "unsophisticated reader" who doesn't stop to think about the dramatic aesthetics of a work of literature but reacts swiftly, instinctively, and personally. Of course, the voice in Keats's odes does not equal the real living breathing man who wrote them. Anybody who has attempted to compose even a middle-school essay realizes that writing demands a certain artificiality of voice and point of view. But the impact of Keats's odes relies on the poet's genius in transcending that artificiality: they purposefully invite the reader "to identify the speaker with the poet himself."

So what's wrong with the fact that we do make that identification? Why do literary critics, at even this dumpy definition-of-terms level, try to make us feel ashamed for doing exactly what the poet wanted us to do? See what I mean? It pisses me off.

Now I kind of wish I'd taken up this subject more fully in Tracing Paradise. But I hope it comes through anyway.