FROM TODAY'S WORD A DAY...prosopopeia also prosopopoeia (pruh-so-puh-PEE-uh) noun

1. A figure of speech in which an absent or imaginary person is represented as speaking.
2. A figure of speech in which inanimate objects or abstractions are endowed with human qualities or are represented as possessing human form. Personification.

"This is not theft, but kidnapping, summoning, prosopopoeia. In Eliot's earlier poem we still have one foot in another poet's hell. Here, Dante is summoned to the City of London, his lines marauded, his inferno woven within another of Eliot's own making." Joseph Dinunzio, Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917,The Review of English Studies, Aug 1998.


I have NO clue, and I cannot stress this enough, what he is going on about. Can somebody explain it in a different manner and please use it in a sentence (a REAL sentence, not a "prosopopeia is a word that must be explained" type of sentence )

Thanks all.