Personification

Abstract

Abstract This chapter examines the trope of personification and the poetics of prosopopoeia in Pater’s writings about Greek myth and religion, particularly in the essay ‘A Study of Dionysus: The Spiritual Form of Fire and Dew’ (1876). This is then placed in relation to his thinking about personhood in later works, firstly in the idea of a companionable divine logos in Marius the Epicurean (1885), and later in the theory of Platonic Universals expounded in Plato and Platonism (1893). I consider Pater’s dialogue with the writings of Arnold and Ruskin on personification, and the daring ways in which Pater’s mythopoeism went further than anyone else in the nineteenth century. I explore the significance of ‘caprice’—the undulancy or wavering inherent to all human relations—as a fundamental corollary of Pater’s religious and metaphysical vision of personification and prosopopoeia.