Consider these provocative paragraphs from Irish poet Brendan Kennelly:
The use of a persona in poetry is not a refusal to confront and explore the self but a method of extending it, procuring for it a more imaginative and enriching breathing space by driving out the demons of embarrassment and inhibition and some, at least, of the more crippling forms of shyness and sensitivity. A persona, though apparently shadowy and elusive, can be a liberating agent. It/he/she can provide friendly company in loneliness and give dignity to desolation.
Through an act of sustained and deliberate indirectness, it is possible to say more completely whatever one has to say. It is one of the fertile paradoxes of poetry that one can be more candid by engaging less in frontalism and by listening more keenly to the voices of the personae in the wings. A persona embodies not only some essential, peculiarly bewildered aspects of one's self but also, one hopes, something of everybody. I don't know why, but I'm convinced that the persona, obliquely manipulating and orchestrating the monstrous yet magnificent energies of egotism, is capable of revealing what the poet at any given moment believes he knows of reality in such a way that, for example, horror is presented with a grace, and therefore a precision, only rarely available to the mere self. Like a courteous host, the personal introduces the self to itself and lets the dialogue begin and continue unimpeded. (Other individuals at the party may crash in, of course. Such interruptions must be endured and allowed to expire before the dialogue can resume.)
We are all occasionally turned to stone by what we witness, think and feel. Out of that selfstone, the imagination moulds and coaxes a persona who, entering poems and animating them by his presence, is seen and felt to be a creature of flesh and blood. The cold of stone is imaginatively caressed into human warmth, surely one of the transfiguring graces of poetry. (It can happen the other way round too, and be no less a transfiguring grace.) My islandman is as real to me as the people I meet every day because he is, in fact, these very people, but without their disconcerting ways, arbitrary opinions, puzzling eccentricities, transient yet upsetting incursions in the the mere, messy self which nevertheless remains the truest if murkiest source of poetry. The persona helps me to see through and under these necessary distractions to the essential humanity of people and therefore to come into contact with what I hope is my own. It is possible, and necessary, to hope that we are beginning to be more human. Poetry insists that we, with the help of the liberating persona, allow ourselves to dare become ourselves, for a time at least. The persona appears to want to make the self more fluid, multiple, articulate. It is like a shadow that darklylightly stresses the validity of the substance.
There may be simple and more effective ways for a poet to do this. I'd love to know them because I want to love every heartbeat, every musical second of happiness and grief, boredom and fun and the usual no-man's-land of viable and reasonably rewarded half-being, permitted between stoneself and definitive dust. Whatever forces help one to love this frequently muted music of time are to be welcomed by the imagination and intelligence, body and soul. Whatever or whoever you are, be with me now.
--from the prose introduction to the poetic "Islandman" in Brendan Kennelly's Familiar Strangers: New & Selected Poems 1960-2004.
Bloodaxe Books, Highgreen, Tarset, Northumberland: 2004.
I've quoted extensively from page 323 of Familiar Strangers. I feel the need to read and reflect upon these paragraphs on persona. I hope you find them as useful and engaging, as provoking and promising as I do.
Time to reread "Islandman" too.
