Prosopopoeia as a Cognitive Ekphrastic Activity: A Case from Eighteenth-Century Graveyard Poetry/PROSOPOPEE COMME UNE ACTIVITE COGNITIVE EKPHRASTIQUE: UN EXEMPLE DE LA POESIE DE CIMETIERE DU DIX-HUITIEME SIECLE
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: This paper examines the use of prosopopoeia in selected eighteenth-century graveyard poetry, highlighting, through close analysis of William Collins's Ode on the Death of Mr. Thompson and Robert Blair's Grave, the poetic, visual, and intellectual underpinnings of prosopopoeia. That is, it aims mainly at revealing the cognitive aspects of prosopopoeia with limited employment of textually analyzed verse that is used only to provide an exemplifying background. It turns out that in their use of the personified abstraction, poets, in general, creatively produce poetry that seeks to concretize human visions and passions in a manner that is universally accessible. That is to say, the cognitive is essenced into the visualized and personified. As they personify, poets do not write, nor write about nature, feeling, thought, and man. Rather, they become the means or ways through whom the experiences of nature, feeling, and thought communicate themselves. Above all, such cognitive nature of visual poetry is proposed as motive for inquiries about the overemphasized rift between the humanities and the sciences. Keywords: prosopopoeia; personification; cognition; graveyard poetry; William Collins; Robert Blair. Resume: Cet article examine l'utilisation de prosopopee dans la poesie de selectionnee du dix-huitieme siecle, mettant en evidence, a travers une analyse attentive de L'ode a la mort de M. Thompson de William Collins et La cimetiere de Robert Blair, la base poetique, visuelle et intellectuelle de la prosopopee. Autrement dit, il vise principalement a reveler les aspects cognitifs de la prosopopee avec un emploi limite de verset textuellement analyse qui est utilise uniquement a fournir un arriere-plan illustrant. Il s'avere que dans leur utilisation de l'abstraction personnifiee, des poetes, en general, produisent de facon creative des poesies, qui visent a concretiser des visions et des passions humaines d'une maniere universellement accessible. C'est-a-dire, le cognitif est integre dans la visualisation et la personnification. Quand ils personnifient, les poetes ne decrivent pas la nature, le sentiment, la pensee, oul'homme. Au contraire, ils deviennent les moyens ou les manieres par lesquelles les experiences de la nature, des sentiments et de la pensee qui se communiquent. Par-dessus tout, ce genre de nature cognitive de la poesie visuelle est propose comme motif de demandes de renseignements sur le fosse trop insiste entre les humanites et les sciences. Mots-cles: prosopopee; personnification; cognition; poesie de cimetiere; William Collins; Robert Blair 1. INTRODUCTION 'Prosopopoeia1 ('personified abstraction') is a figure of speech that designates the linguistic act of giving human qualities to abstract ideas, animals, and inanimate objects. The attribute 'abstract' refers to words or phrases that name things not knowable through the five human senses. Perhaps the earliest view of personification comes from ancient rhetoric in which an abstract entity is turned into an agent embodying a moral value, so that the value is understood through its personification into personae whom we receive as figures standing for the ideals they characterize. One may perhaps refer to Mystery1 and 'Morality' plays in Middle English literature, the first dealing with what seemed then obscure Christian notions such as Genesis and Crucifixion, and the second with moral Christian values, as domains where prosopopoeia was recruited to help in creating a graspable discourse. By personifying, the abstract figure (such as hope, friendship, love etc.) or the event (like death) are rendered according to a human scale, so as to understand them concretely as personified agents parallel to human beings. Poets, as also everyday individuals, personify when they metaphorically give life to normally inanimate objects or human experiences (feelings, thoughts, etc.) that are not sensed by the mostly acknowledged five human senses. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".