- personification
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—personificator, n./peuhr son'euh fi kay"sheuhn/, n.1. the attribution of a personal nature or character to inanimate objects or abstract notions, esp. as a rhetorical figure.2. the representation of a thing or abstraction in the form of a person, as in art.3. the person or thing embodying a quality or the like; an embodiment or incarnation: He is the personification of tact.4. an imaginary person or creature conceived or figured to represent a thing or abstraction.5. the act of personifying.6. a character portrayal or representation in a dramatic or literary work.[1745-55; PERSONI(FY) + -FICATION]
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figure of speech in which human characteristics are attributed to an abstract quality, animal, or inanimate object. An example is “The Moon doth with delight / Look round her when the heavens are bare” (William Wordsworth (Wordsworth, William), “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” 1807). Another is “Death lays his icy hand on kings” (James Shirley (Shirley, James), “The Glories of Our Blood and State,” 1659). Personification has been used in European poetry since Homer and is particularly common in allegory; (allegory) for example, the medieval morality play Everyman (c. 1500) and the Christian prose allegory Pilgrim's Progress (1678) by John Bunyan (Bunyan, John) contain characters such as Death, Fellowship, Knowledge, Giant Despair, Sloth, Hypocrisy, and Piety. Personification became almost an automatic mannerism in 18th-century Neoclassical poetry, as exemplified by these lines from Thomas Gray's (Gray, Thomas) “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard”:Here rests his head upon the lap of earthA youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown:Fair science frowned not on his humble birth,And Melancholy marked him for her own.* * *
Universalium. 2010.
