Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up That Hill’ and the Power of I as Other

When the libertine poet Arthur Rimbaud wrote what is known as the Seer Letters to Paul Demeny in 1871, he insisted “Je est un Autre” (“I am an Other”). Rimbaud could only have dreamed of the visionary art-pop of Kate Bush mastering that phrase’s highest expression: writing songs from another’s perspective.

The persona poem is a poetic literary device — writing in the first-person “I” in character. Persona is Latin for “false face” or “mask”, and its tradition stems from commedia dell’arte. Bush studied mime and dance with Lindsey Kemp, David Bowie’s choreographer. With Bush’s penchant for the theatrical, it isn’t any wonder that playing with point of view would be her strong suit.