Personification is a type of metaphor where inanimate objects or animals are given human characteristics. Both are literary devices used in poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, but rarely in everyday speech. Examples can be found in literature, art, and advertising.
The difference between personification and metaphor is that personification is a type of metaphor. This means that metaphor is a broader term that encompasses many smaller ideas. In personification, an inanimate object or animal receives human characteristics. A metaphor, meanwhile, substitutes one person, object, or story for another. Both forms are rarely used literary devices in everyday speech.
In personification and metaphor, an abstract thought is represented in a more human form. This is purely a literary device found in poetry, fiction, and sometimes non-fiction. It is rarely found in rhetoric or speech. Personification can also be used in art.
If human characteristics can also be attributed to animals, then many films and cartoons are also types of personification and metaphor. The “Toy Story” cartoons give toys, both humanoid and non-humanoid in shape, human characteristics and lives. In the cartoon “Cars”, the same happens with cars. These ideas go back to movies like “The Love Bug” about Herbie a beetle car and old Walt Disney and Warner Brothers cartoons like Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny.
In literature and poetry personification and metaphor are used to provide further detail. Pure metaphors differ in that they tell a narrative while personifications, like symbols, provide additional detail. There are many examples of basic personifications in literature, such as having “roaring wind” or “shy flowers”.
John Milton used the personification in his “Paradise Lost”. Robert Frost, an American poet, was also a great user of personifications and metaphors. William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” provides a good example of the use of personification in drama: “The earth which is nature’s mother is his grave; what is her sepulchral tomb which is her womb.’ Theodore Roethke’s “Root Cellar” also provides an example with “even the dirt kept breathing a little breath.”
Personification and metaphor can also be used in art and photography. There are two ways to represent it. The first is to give animals and objects more human-like characteristics. The other way is to photograph or paint objects that naturally have, as the viewers see it, human characteristics. These can include making changes to fruits and vegetables to make them look more like human faces.
The augmentation of animals and objects to give them human characteristics is also used in advertising. This could be done by insinuating that hair or cars prefer one product or type of product over another. This idea could be extended to have milk in preference to a certain type of biscuit, for example. Other ads ask impersonation questions such as “What do your clothes say about you?” or insist that the object is more than it appears.
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