I’m very belatedly joining the Praxis Fellows blog after more than a semester of meaning to write this post and not writing it. Let me start with the word that has been keeping me busy instead.
Prosopopoeia
Pro-so-po-PEE-a. It comes from the Greek prosopon (“face,” “mask”) and poiein (“to make”), and it means, roughly, to give a face to something that doesn’t have one—or more precisely, to give speech to something that cannot speak. (The Greek word for “make” is also where we get the word “poem”—literally “a made thing.”) When a poet makes a dead person talk, that’s prosopopoeia. When the poet makes the wind talk, or a river, or a nation— prosopopoeia. It’s one of the oldest tricks in the rhetorical toolkit, and one of the strangest: the fiction that things which have no voice—or rather, a voice which we are not accustomed to listening for—can be “given” one by the writer.
What I’d like to do in this post is walk through a few examples of prosopopoeia to give you a sense of why this figure fascinates me and why I think it matters so much.
A courtroom ghost
Let’s begin in a Roman courtroom. In 56 BCE, Cicero was defending a young man named Marcus Caelius Rufus against charges of political violence. Cicero’s strategy was to reframe the whole prosecution as the scheme of a scorned lover—Clodia Metelli, a powerful patrician widow who had been Caelius’s mistress. To discredit Clodia, Cicero did something audacious: he announced that he would summon from the dead her own ancestor, Appius Claudius Caecus—the famous blind censor who built the Via Appia, Rome’s first great road—and let him address her directly.
What follows is one of the most celebrated prosopopoeiae in classical rhetoric. Cicero assumes Appius’s voice directly and has him thunder at Clodia: Woman, what business have you with Caelius? What business with a young boy? The address is deliberately humiliating. The Latin word Cicero uses, “mulier” (“Woman!”), strips Clodia of her patrician dignity. The jurors know these are Cicero’s words, not Appius’s, but when placed in his mouth they take on, almost by alchemy, a new kind of power. Prosopopoeia, in this instance, is able to create a sense of moral authority, seemingly out of thin air.
A silent urn’s subversive speech
If the Cicero example shows prosopopoeia as a deliberate rhetorical strategy, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” shows how the figure can be a force of destabilization—how the question of who is speaking can even become unanswerable.
You probably know the poem’s famous last lines: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” But here are the closing lines, in the version most modern anthologies print:
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” —that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
With the quotation marks around the phrase “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” it seems quite clear that the urn is given a chance to speak and offer its profound metaphysical proposition on the nature of beauty and truth. The trouble is that those quotation marks do not appear in transcripts of the poem made by Keats’s friends, nor do they appear in other printed versions. This has led to major critical disagreement over how much speech can really be attributed to the urn. Are the lines “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” said by the urn with the rest attributed to the lyric speaker of the poem or is the urn meant to be saying the entirety of the last two lines? Without any quotation marks indicating who is saying what, is the “ye” in the final line addressing the speaker of the poem, the readers of the poem, the urn, or the painted figures on the urn itself?
The instability of the speaker gives way to an instability of tone. Is the statement about beauty and truth a profound metaphysical proposition? Or is it a comic overstatement representing the naive and narrow point of view of the urn? The shifting quotation marks across manuscripts and editions are the material trace of a question prosopopoeia always raises: when we give speech to something that cannot speak, whose voice are we really hearing? And how exactly are we meant to hear them?
The sled dog, the bee, and the pig
This is where my dissertation comes in. The first chapter focuses on what I’m calling “animal persona poems”—contemporary poems written from the perspective of nonhuman animals. These poems occupy a strange position relative to prosopopoeia. Strictly speaking, they’re dramatic monologues: a poet assumes a character and speaks as that character, the way Browning speaks as the Duke of Ferrara in “My Last Duchess.” But the character is a sled dog, or a bee, or a pig. And the fact that the character is an animal changes everything about how the ventriloquism works.
Consider Timothy Donnelly’s “Malamute,” from his collection The Problem of the Many (2019). The poem is written in long, winding, syntactically complex sentences—each stanza essentially one sprawling clause accumulating subordinate phrases. Every verse paragraph opens with the same refrain: “When I was a dog I pulled the sled with the other dogs.” That past tense is crucial. This isn’t a dog speaking in the moment; it’s a being that once inhabited a dog’s body and now reflects from some other vantage point. The dog pulled the sled with the other dogs “who didn’t know I didn’t know”—it conceals its disquiet, its not-belonging, while the elaborate syntax enacts an interiority far exceeding anything we’d attribute to a naturalistic animal consciousness. The poem doesn’t pretend to offer transparent access to a dog’s mind. It foregrounds its own artifice.
Or take “As Bee,” by Paula Bohince. Here the speaker is a bee—polite, reflective, stoically aware of its own brevity. “This is my first and only spring on earth. / I get it.” The bee wonders parenthetically about its own mother—”(did I have one?)”—which captures both biological reality (bees don’t have individual mothers in any meaningful sense) and deeper emotional uncertainty. What strikes me about this poem is the “As” in the title, which marks the poem as a performance, a speaking-as, not a speaking-from.
And there’s Margaret Atwood’s “Pig Song,” from You Are Happy (1974) which features a sequence called “Songs of the Transformed” in which nine speakers are animals who have been changed by “Madame.” The pig describes itself in grotesque imagery—”a greypink vegetable with slug / eyes, buttock / incarnate, spreading like a slow turnip”—and then turns on its captor: “Madame, this song offends you, these grunts / which you find oppressively sexual, mistaking / simple greed for lust.” The poem’s final lines crystallize something about prosopopoeia itself: “I am yours. If you feed me garbage, / I will sing a song of garbage. / This is a hymn.” The pig will mirror back exactly what it receives, and the mirroring becomes sacred utterance. The voice given to the degraded creature becomes the vehicle for its resistance.
The paradox
What connects all these examples—the Roman courtroom, the Grecian urn, the sled dog and the bee and the pig—is a shared paradox. Speaking for what cannot speak or what cannot be thought to speak is simultaneously an act of imaginative generosity and an act of appropriation. The voice that emerges always belongs to two speakers at once—the ostensible speaker (the ancestor, the urn, the animal) and the real one (the orator, the poet). And the uncertainty about whose voice we’re really hearing is prosopopoeia’s deepest feature.
For my dissertation, this paradox becomes especially charged when the subject is an animal. Animals do have voices—they bark and sing and grunt and click, not to mention the huge range of gestures and non-speech acts they perform. They communicate, even if we can’t fully understand what they’re saying. So the poet who writes in the voice of a dog or a bee isn’t conjuring speech from silence, the way Keats does with his urn. The poet is replacing one kind of utterance (the animal’s actual, opaque expressiveness) with another (human language). The animal already has a face. The poet is putting a new one on top of it. And the most interesting animal poems, I think, are the ones that know this—that build the awareness of their own ventriloquism into their formal structures.
More to come. My dissertation explores what happens to poetic language when it tries to cross the species boundary, and part of what excites me about being a Praxis Fellow is thinking about how digital methods might shape that inquiry—how you curate a corpus of poems, how you present and sequence them, and what it means to build a digital environment that lets readers encounter those poems rather than just read about them. In my next post, I’ll write about a workshop I recently ran in which participants assembled their own anthologies of Aesop’s fables and then designed pen-and-paper wireframes for how they’d present them as websites. Until then, thank you for reading.
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