Prosopopoeia as a Cognitive Ekphrastic Activity: A Case from Eighteenth-Century Graveyard Poetry
Bibliographic record
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 “The 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
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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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".