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Pathetic Fallacy
or
Poetic Fallacy
Pathetic Fallacy
• A term coined by English critic John
Ruskin to identify writing that falsely
endows nonhuman things with human
intentions and feelings, such as "angry
clouds" and "sad trees". The pathetic
fallacy is a required convention in the
classical poetic form of the pastoral elegy,
and it is used in the modern poetry of T. S.
Eliot, Ezra Pound, and the Imagists.
Pathetic Fallacy
• The ascribing of human traits or feelings to
inanimate nature for eloquent effect,
especially feelings in sympathy with those
expressed or experienced by the writer.
Pathetic Fallacy
• Poetic practice of attributing human
emotion or responses to nature, inanimate
objects, or animals. The practice is a form
of personification that is as old as poetry,
in which it has always been common to
find smiling or dancing flowers, angry or
cruel winds, brooding mountains, moping
owls, or happy larks. The term was coined
by John Ruskin in Modern Painters (1843–
60).