The plot thickens!
>Date: Wed Nov 22 00:01:12 EST 2000
Subject: A.Word.A.Day--prosopopoeia
X-Bonus: This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere: the dew is never all dried at once: a shower is forever falling, vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls. -John Muir, naturalist, explorer, and writer (1838-1914)
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.
[Latin prosopopoeia, from Greek prosopopoiia : prosopon, face, mask,
dramatic character : pros-, pros- + opon, face (from ops, eye) + poiein,
to make.]
"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.
This week's theme: words from the world of literature.<
