sus

Well-known member
"An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere." - Flaubert

“The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails”

― James Joyce

And Eliot's famous essay on impersonality:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69400/tradition-and-the-individual-talent

These are some jumping off points. Also, naturally, Yeats's theory of masks.

I'll add on some Paglia and Milton and Gass

https://salmagundi.skidmore.edu/articles/12-the-death-of-the-author

Anonymity, of some real if not literal sort, is a condition of poetry. A good poem, even if it is signed with a full and well- known name, intends as a work of art to lose the identity of the author; that is, it means to represent him not actualized, like an eye-witness testifying in court and held strictly by zealous counsel to the point at issue, but freed from his juridical or prose self and taking an ideal or fictitious personality; otherwise his evidence amounts the less to poetry.

+

Western personality thus originates in the idea of a mask. Society is the place of masks, a ritual theater. Persona's artistic origins were recovered by modernism and the New Criticism, which stripped the text of biographical baggage. For the New Critics, a writer never speaks for himself but only through an assumed persona, a mask. Following World War Two, the classroom set piece was Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, where a self-absorbed voice, airily proposing the cannibalistic farming of Irish infants, is the butt of the author's satire. Irony and game-playing are central to this view of literature and life. The New Critical persona was indebted to Jung, who sees a split between our inner and outer selves, an authentic psychic reality versus the mask conforming to social expectation. Popularized Jungianism, especially in its American feminist form, has become increasingly Rousseauist; that is, it tends to view society as automatically restrictive or oppressive instead of educative or civilizing.
 

luka

Well-known member
One thing I tell people with poetry is that the trick is to find a voice. It doesn't have to be yours, anything that will speak. If it speaks, record it
 

sus

Well-known member
a mask, a persona

the problem is this cult of expressivity that thinks the only acceptable behavior (and hence artistic persona) is a single, consistent, interlocutor-indifferent, "authentic" self
 

luka

Well-known member
a mask, a persona

the problem is this cult of expressivity that thinks the only acceptable behavior (and hence artistic persona) is a single, consistent, interlocutor-indifferent, "authentic" self

Well I don't think so if masks are involved
 

luka

Well-known member
This is precisely what is solved once you introduce the mask. This is something poetry adopted as strategy a very long time ago
 

luka

Well-known member
The mask has been standard in poetry for at least 100 years and for the reason you give
 

sus

Well-known member
could be true of poetry but I don't think it's true of millennial culture nor of pop music
 
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