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: