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Phillipp Veit's Germania (1877), a national personification of Germany.

A personification is a figure of speech that gives an inanimate object or abstract idea human traits and qualities, such as emotions, desires, sensations, physical gestures and speech.^[1]

Use

Some simple examples of personification in English:

• The flowers were suffering from the intense heat.
• The teddy bear sat slumped on the bed, looking sadly at its feet.
• The freezer froze when caught eating ice-cream

In business and political news reportage, personification is commonly used to convey a sense of agency for otherwise abstract entities like nations, machines or corporations:

• US Defends Sale of Ports Company to Arab Nation ^[2]

In English literature, personification is oft-used as a literary device:

• In John Keats's To Autumn, the fall season is personified as "sitting careless on a granary floor" (line 14) and "drowsed with the fume of poppies" (line 17).
• In John Donne's Holy Sonnet X, death is personified as a "slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate sucking men" (line 9).

Similar figures of speech

The pathetic fallacy is the generalization of personification which applies to any description of inanimate objects or abstractions imbuing them with human-like traits. Anthropomorphism is a particular form of personification which gives such traits to tangible objects or natural phenomena. These are all allusive figures of speech called tropes.

Personification is not to be confused with prosopopoeia because actually they mean almost the same thing and could be seen as a synopsis, which is the act of an author or writer narrating as another person or some other object. An apostrophe is where one addresses a personified or anthropomorphized object.

Lawyered

See also

• National personification
• Father Time
• Mascot
• Heraldry

References

1. Unknown, . "Personification." Poetry As We See It. 1 June 2003. ThinkQuest. 30 May 2008 <http://library.thinkquest.org/J0112392/personification>.