A persona, in the word's everyday usage, is a social role or a character played by an actor. This is an Italian word that derives from the Latin for a kind of mask made to resonate with the voice of the actor (per sonare meaning "to sound through").[1]
The Latin word probably derived from the Etruscan word "phersu", with the same meaning, and that from the Greek "πρόσωπον". Its meaning in the latter Roman period changed to indicate a "character" of a theatrical performance.
In literature
In literature the term has become associated with the work of two modern poets, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. They understood the term slightly differently and derived its use and meaning from different traditions. Eliot had taken over and developed Laforgue's ironic "I", whereas Pound worked from Robert Browning's dramatic monologues. Eliot's personae were Prufrock and Sweeney, Pound's were Cino, Bertran de Born, Propertius, and Mauberley. Whereas Eliot used 'masks' to distance himself from aspects of modern life which he found degrading and repulsive, Pound's personae were poets and could be considered in good part alter-egos who are to be dissociated from 'characters' like Malatesta, John Adams, Conducius, or Thomas Jefferson that we find in Pound's later poetry, The Cantos. For Pound, the personae were a way of working through a specific poetic problem. In this sense, the persona is a transparent mask, wearing the traits of two poets and responding to two situations, old and new, which are similar and overlapping. In Homage to Sextus Propertius, for example, Pound 'translated' parts of Propertius's elegies and by means of various modernisations of diction, drew attention to parallelisms existing between Propertius's situation and Pound's own, especially the pressures of living in an empire at war and Pound's need to cease writing shorter lyrical poems and start on longer epic structures. Pound at that time (1917) had written his first three Cantos but was doubtful of their value. In writing the Homage he worked through his anxieties of whether the epic was compatible with modernity or worth writing at all, given the political and social statement of the genre. Pound at that time had no political education, which he would start to acquire only after the end of WWI with C.H. Douglas and A.R. Orage in the offices of The New Age.
In psychology
The persona is also the mask or appearance one presents to the world. It may appear in dreams under various guises (see Carl Jung and his psychology).
source: wikipedia
Sorry, I don't have any more time to search for other resources. Just to be sure, I'm studying this kind of stuffs, especially the psychology part :)
