SOURCE: Lawton, David. “Skelton's Use of Persona.” Essays in Criticism 30, No. 1 (January 1980): 9-27.

In the following essay, Lawton argues that most of Skelton's major poetry is essentially a “rhetoric of moral values,” and that his varied and sophisticated use of personae draws his audience's attention to those values and the need for individual and social purification.

The most distinctive quality of Skelton's major poems is his subtle, confident and varied use of personae. In this sophistication Skelton is unmatched both by his Renaissance successors and by his English predecessors with the possible exception of Chaucer, although Skelton must have owed a substantial debt to the traditional figure of the dreamer in vision poetry. A literary persona is more likely to be a means than an end—a means, that is, of focusing our attention on various aspects of the text and the issues it raises. It is less...