A circumlocution, a roundabout expression that avoids naming something by its most direct term. Since it is constituted through a culturally perceived relationship to a word or phrase that it is not, p. has no distinctive form of its own but articulates itself variously through other figures, esp. metaphor (q.v.). Quintilian subdivides it by function into two types: the euphemistic or “necessary,” as in the avoidance of obscenity or other unpleasant matters (Plato’s “the fated journey” for “death”—cf. the modern “passing away”); and the decorative, used for stylistic embellishment (Virgil’s “Aurora sprinkled the earth with new light” for “day broke”). The descriptive kind includes most periphrases which approximate a two-word definition by combining a specific with a general term (”the finny tribe” to signify fish). Pseudo-Longinus considered it productive of sublimity but, like Quintilian, warned against its excesses, such as preciosity or pleonasm Later writers have characterized it as representing a term by its (whole or partial) definition, as in the expression “pressed milk” for “cheese.” P. also appears in poetry that tries to translate culture-specific concepts from one lang. to another without neologism.
Though it is unlikely that any movement or era in poetry has succeeded in suppressing p. altogether, some styles favor it more than others. Curtius (275 ff.) associates it, like other rhetorical ornaments, with mannerism and marks stages in its use and abuse. Oral traditions frequently build formulas around periphrases, as in the patronymic “son of Tydeus” for “Diomedes”; these have important metrical functions and are not ornament
While widely used in biblical and Homeric lit. and by Hesiod, the devel. of p. as an important feature of poetic style begins with Lucretius and Virgil, and through their influence it became a staple device of epic and descriptive poetry throughout the Middle Ages and into the Ren. Classified by medieval rhetoricians as a trope of amplification suited the conception of style which emphasized copia and invention The OE poetic device of variation (q.v.) typically employs multiple periphrastic constructions, as does the kenning the characteristic device of Old Germanic and ON poetry, which in its more elaborate forms illustrates the connection between p. and riddle (q.v.).
Given new impetus through the work of the Pléiade (q.v.), p. proliferated in 17th-c. diction, particularly as influenced by the scientific spirit of the age, and even more so in the stock poetic diction of the 18th c., where descriptive poetry often shows periphrastic constructions (Arthos). Since the 18th c., the form has lost much of its prestige in the romantic and modern reaction against rhetorical artifice; more often than not it survives only in inflated uses for humorous effect, as in Dickens. Yet its occasional appearance in the work of modernists such as T. S. Eliot (”white hair of the waves blown back” for “foam”) suggests that, insofar as directness of locution is not always the preferable route (direct speech being, most often, shorn of semantic density and allusive richness), p. has an enduring poetic usefulness.
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