Poems are personal. Poems come to us as the expression of an individual human voice. That voice is often the voice of the poet. But not always. Poets sometimes create "characters" just as writers of fiction or drama do. The speaker, one of those "characters" created by the poet may express ideas or feelings very different from the poet's own.
Persona, Tone, and Voice.
These terms, frequent in recent criticism, reflect the tendency to think of narrative and lyric works of literature as a mode of speech, or in what is now a favored term, as discourse. To conceive a work as an utterance suggests that there is a speaker who has determinate personal qualities, and who expresses attitudes both toward the characters and materials within the work and toward the audience to whom the work is addressed.
Ethos
In his Rhetoric (fourth century B.C.), Aristotle, followed by other Greek and
Roman rhetoricians, pointed out that an orator projects in the course of his
oration an ethos, that is, a personal character, which itself functions as a
means of persuasion. For example, if the impression a speaker projects is that
of a person of rectitude, intelligence, and goodwill, the audience is instinctively
inclined to give credence to such a speaker's arguments.
Persona
the Latin word for the mask worn by actors in the classical
theater, from which was derived the term dramatis personae for the list of
characters who play a role in a drama, and ultimately the English word "person,"
a particular individual. In recent literary discussion "persona" is often
applied to the first-person speaker who tells the story in a narrative poem or
novel, or whose voice we hear in a lyric poem.
Tone
In an influential discussion, I. A. Richards defined tone as the expression
of a literary speaker's "attitude to his listener." "The tone of his utterance reflects
. . . his sense of how he stands toward those he is addressing" (Practical
Criticism, 1929, chapters 1 and 3).
The sense in which the term is used in recent criticism is suggested by the phrase "tone of voice," as applied to nonliterary speech. The way we speak reveals, by subtle clues, our conception of, and attitude to, the things we are talking about, our
personal relation to our auditor, and also our assumptions about the social
level, intelligence, and sensitivity of that auditor. The tone of a speech can be
described as critical or approving, formal or intimate, outspoken or reticent,
solemn or playful, arrogant or prayerful, angry or loving, serious or ironic,
condescending or obsequious, and so on through numberless possible nuances
of relationship and attitude both to object and auditor.
Voice
Voice, in a recently evolved usage, signifies the equivalent in imaginative
literature to Aristotle's "ethos" in a speech of persuasive rhetoric, and suggests
also the traditional rhetorician's concern with the importance of the physical
voice in an oration. The term in criticism points to the fact that we are aware
of a voice beyond the fictitious voices that speak in a work, and a persona
behind all the dramatic personae, and behind even the first-person narrator.
We have the sense, that is, of a pervasive authorial presence, a determinate intelligence and moral sensibility, who has invented, ordered, and rendered all
these literary characters and materials in just this way.