Pathetic Fallacy

1
Pathetic Fallacy

• or
• Poetic Fallacy

2
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.

3
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.

4
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 (184360).