paganize

Auden tends to explicitly paganize his personifications of love in this volume, evoking Cupid for example in "Some say that Love's a little boy," Venus in "Lay your sleeping head my love," and Eros and Aphrodite in "In Memory of Sigmund Freud." This tendency suggests not just an increasing repudiation of determinism, however, but also a growing commitment to what one might call "realism." In representing the exercise of art's prerogative to grant agency within the invoked world of the poem, personified figures seem to flicker with the hope that art can somehow work to manifest new modes of agency in the world at large.

The fresh perspective is likely to spark controversy in positing, among other things, that Gnosticism was merely a failed attempt to paganize Christianity and the decline in paganism was less due to state repression than the appeal of Christianity to the masses.

Thus Paniche, the translator's creation, dramatizes his negative response to Bersuire's discussion of the absolute power of herbs by presenting an artificial buffer figure, one that historicizes and paganizes Bersuire's contemporary view, rhetorically weakening its authority.