A Brief Look at Adoni's Personas

Returning to the human heritage is one of the most important concerns of the world's contemporary literature. In this regard, T. S. Eliot's objective correlative was highly welcomed by the contemporary poets of the world, especially Arab ones. This theory entered into the domain of Arabic poetry and literary criticism under the title 'persona'. Persona is one of the modern ways of symbolization in which feeling and poetic experience of the poet is transferred to the reader in addition to the transfer of thought. When persona is used, due to the unification of the Persona's voice and that of the poet, a conflict arises in the reader's mind due to his inability to differentiate between the voices of the persona and the poet. This process leads to the participation of the addressee in creating literary works. In this article, after introducing persona as a rhetorical device, the personas of "Orpheus, Odysseus, Noah, and Mahyar Dameshqi” are descriptively inspected in Adoni's (Ali Ahmad Saids) poetry. Adonis has borrowed these personas from Greek myths, Islamic culture, and Iranian culture, respectively. Each of these personas, especially that of Mahyar Dameshqi, represents a particular experience in Adoni's life. The present article shows that one of the ways Adonis interacts with the human tradition and legacy is his use of persona as a rhetorical device.