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

Personification, or personification anthropomorphism is a figure of speech that gives non-humans and objects human traits and qualities. These attributes may include sensations, emotions, desires, physical gestures, expressions, and powers of speech, among others. As a figure of speech it has a very long history; its Greek name is prosopopoeia. Personification is widely used in poetry and in other art forms. Personification can also be used in English to emphasize a conversational point.

The personification of inanimate objects is very similar to the figure of speech called the pathetic fallacy; the key difference is that personification is direct and explicit in the ascription of life and sentience to the thing in question, whereas the pathetic fallacy is much broader and more allusive. Another related rhetorical device is apostrophe; this entails not speaking about, but speaking to, a personified entity or an absent person. All these tropes should be understood as separate from anthropomorphism, which ascribes human attributes to any non-human entities, in particular to animals and other creatures.

An example of personification can be found in John Keats's "To Autumn": the fall season is personified as "sitting careless on a granary floor" 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 men" (line 9).

Personification is also widely used by individuals and mass media outlets when describing the actions of governments or corporations, such as "U.S. Defends Sale of Ports Company to Arab Nation" ^[1] or "Microsoft embarrassed one final time over PS2". ^[2] This use of personification is frequently employed in newspaper and magazine headlines as well as cartoons.

• Knapp, Stephen. Personification and the Sublime. Harvard, 1985.

• National personification