Chapter 10 - Personification

Summary

This chapter aims to help the twenty-first-century reader respond alertly and sympathetically to personification, a prominent feature of eighteenth-century poetry sometimes met with impatience. The first section attempts to recover how personification operated for the period’s poets and readers. The second reexamines the use of gender in creating personifications as significant, not simply conventional, figures; and the third looks at personification as a way of knowing and interpreting the world, not merely decorating it.

Recovering personification

Many modern readers automatically sympathize with Wordsworth’s renunciation of most personification in the Preface of 1800 to Lyrical Ballads:

The Reader will find that personifications of abstract ideas rarely occur in these volumes; and, I hope, are utterly rejected as an ordinary device to elevate the style, and raise it above prose. I have proposed to myself to imitate, and, as far as is possible, to adopt the very language of men; and assuredly such personifications do not make any natural or regular part of that language … I have wished to keep my Reader in the company of flesh and blood, persuaded that by so doing I shall interest him.