SOURCE: "Horror Personification in Late Eighteenth Century Poetry," in Studies in Philology, Vol. 59, No. 3, July, 1962, pp. 560-78.

In the following essay, Spacks traces the personification of the supernatural in English poetry of the late eighteenth century and its influence on the presentation of supernatural entities in poetry of the early nineteenth century.

Although eighteenth-century attitudes toward the reality of the supernatural were Various and frequently ambiguous, even highly rational critics commonly felt that super-natural personages had a legitimate place in poetry and drama, where they could function as imaginative creations. The precise nature of that place, however, remained through most of the century a vexed question, and efforts to answer the question produced an appalling, if historically interesting, bulk of bad poetry. One solution, attempted frequently, was based on that favorite eighteenth-century variety of metaphor, the personification. Addison early noted the connection between personifications and other forms of...