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

Personification is an ontological metaphor in which a thing or abstraction is represented as a person.¹

The term "personification" may apply to:

1. The act of personifying.
2. A person or thing typifying a certain quality or idea; an embodiment or exemplification: "He's invisible, a walking personification of the Negative" (Ralph Ellison).
3. An artistic representation of an abstract quality or idea as a person.

Personification in English

Personification in English is giving something which isn't human, human qualities. Personification is a type of figurative language.

E.g/ The tea kettle whistled a merry tune. The leaves danced in the wind.The autumn wind played slow,soft,wonderful songs

Use

Some simple examples of personification in English:

• Santa Claus personifies Christmas
• Jack Frost personifies winter
• Mother Nature or Mother Earth personifies the ecosystem
• The Angel of Death personifies death

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).
• The arms of a chair or the legs of a table (ect).

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, which is the act of a writer or writer narrating as another person or some other object. An apostrophe is where one addresses a personified or anthropomorphized object.

See also

• Description
• National personification
• Father Time
• Mascot
• Heraldry

References

External sources

• Unknown, . "Personification". Poetry As We See It. 1 June 2003. ThinkQuest. 30 May 2008.

v • d • e Tudor Moralities and Interludes
	Interludes	The Castle of Perseverance • Mankind • Everyman • The World and the Child • Interlude of Youth • The Disobedient Child • Liberality and Prodigality • Horestes • The Seven Deadly Sins
	Related works	Medieval theatre • Psychomachia • Autos sacramentales • Ordo Virtutum • Elckerlijc • A Satire of the Three Estates • A Looking Glass for London • Four Plays in One • Pathomachia • The Sun's Darling
	Characters	Vice • Folly • Death • Personification