Entertainment / Literature / Personification: A trope in which abstractions, animals, ideas, and inanimate objects are given human character, traits, abilities, or reactions. Personification is particularly common in poetry, but it appears in nearly all types of artful writing. Examples include Keat's treatment of the vase in 'Ode on a Grecian Urn,' in which the urn is treated as a 'sylvan historian, who canst thus express / A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme,' or Sylvia Plath's 'The Moon and the Yew Tree,' in which the moon 'is a face in its own right, / White as a knuckle and terribly upset. / It drags the sea after it like a dark crime.' When discussing the ways that animistic religions personify natural forces with human qualities, scientists refer to this process as 'anthropomorphizing,' sometimes with derogatory overtones. A special sub-type of personification is prosopopoeia, in which an inanimate object is given the ability of human speech. Apostrophe (not to be confused with the punctuation mark) is a special type of personification in which a speaker in a poem or rhetorical work pauses to address some abstraction that is not physically present in the room. See also prosopopoeia, apostrophe therianthropic, and theriomorphic.
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Entertainment / Literature / Apostrophe: Not to be confused with the punctuation mark, apostrophe is the act of addressing some abstraction or personification that is not physically present: For instance, John Donne commands, 'Oh, Death, be MORE