Prosopopoeial Poetry of Personal Prophetic Transfiguration - Sylvia Plath's "Lady Lazarus" and David Bowie's "Lazarus"

Prosopopoeia, as a literary device is not uncommon in both English and American literature, since authors have been using it throughout literary history in order to introduce a manufactured and contrived presentation of characters or personified things, that is, feigned sub specie personae. This paper examines the importance of prosopopoeia as a literary device in revealing certain personal prophetic visions when in anticipation of one’s own imminent death with examples from Sylvia Plath and David Bowie’s poetics. Through the impersonation of the absent speaker or a personification, the language of the prosopopoeia has a purpose of transfiguration by revealing the staggering horrors of inner struggles, thus becoming the enabling device through which one speaks about one’s forthcoming, expected death. More specifically, this paper focuses on the adoption of such voices of the imagined Biblical figures in Sylvia Plath’s poem “Lady Lazarus” and in David Bowie’s song “Lazarus” which express a prophetic vision of the personal self, as well as the predictive resurrection and life after death through one’s own immortal artistic legacy and output.