Rhetorical Drift

Recent conversations at Harriet on poetry and rhetoric have been provocative. It’s interesting to watch the different responses to the term “rhetoric,” and how age-old problems between it, poetry, and dialectic persist (see Plato’s Gorgias for the map). Now usually, on TV or in other popular media, rhetoric is used pejoratively: “the CEO spoke rhetorically” ie, lying to you or spinning some item to the speaker’s benefit. It seems almost as if rhetoric doesn’t exist until someone lies or tries to convince you of something.

But rhetoric is a vast art and impossible to summarize carefully—and no one agrees on what it is, either, which means it’s a rich and complex body of knowledge that provides some insight to writing and speaking. It is gnarled too by its institutional and cultural histories: the rhetoric of the Middle Ages was not that of the Classical period. Augustine, a trained rhetorician prior to becoming a Christian, introduced hermeneutical studies to rhetoric in specific ways, and reminds me that grammar and rhetoric together provided a great source of knowledge. Grammar laid out the morphological basis of the language whereas rhetoric dealt with the psychological dimension of it: how do we speak or write in certain situations.

In the Renaissance rhetoric became a powerful tool of state as humanist scholarship introduced the civic discourse of the ancient world. Printing also complicated rhetoric at this time, creating what Wayne Rebhorn, in The Emperor of Men’s Minds (Cornell, 1995), calls “an imbalance of power between […] readers and legitimate rulers” that “put […] a weapon in the hands of the former by means of which they could criticize, resist, and possibly even subvert the rule of the latter” (103). For the Renaissance Prince, deliberative rhetoric, however, was less important than the epideictic mode, used “to celebrate rulers for their good qualities while denouncing others for their bad” (107). Rhetoric gave tools to those who would increase their power and influence over others. The epideictic mode is complicated, more artful and capable of symbolic acts than deliberative or forensic investigations. Machiavelli’s “princes are creators of shows, of spettacoli, a procedure based on the deeply rhetorical assumptions that the world is a place of appearances, that all truths are provisional and contingent, and that one can impose one’s will on others by manipulating the image one projects” (54). Rhetoric’s associations with magic and witchcraft are common. In the symbolic realm this projection of Ethos correlates with poiesis, too.

What I’ve found useful about the study of rhetoric is that it has introduced me to the practical values of language in a cultural and historic context that helps me better understand contemporary usage. As a rhetorician, when I write about poetry I am expected not to show what a text is by identifying all the references, etc, but to show what it does in its various contexts for diverse readers. As a poet I’ve tried to use Slow Poetry as a way to begin a discussion about poetry that is informed by a more rhetorical perspective than a literary one.

There is of course resistance to rhetoric. Poetry and art are objectively beautiful: they are not rhetorically constructed. Some claim. Poems don’t communicate, they exist, tree-like, in the forest until someone is capable of approaching the poem’s majesty. (W. S. Merwin at a reading I attended recently made this claim—poems don’t communicate—even as he spoke from a podium to an audience of several hundred.) Within the large field of interdisciplinary pursuits known as English Studies also, few agree on what literature is. Professors of literature focus on the hermeneutical aspect: interpretation is their bread-and-butter. Compositionists often refuse to allow literature in the classroom because their job is to have students produce texts, not interpret the work of others. Creative Writing pedagogy, by contrast, identifies particular models that are used to instruct students on a variety of contemporary assumptions re: literature based in part on the perspective of the instructor and on the particular relationship of the MFA program to larger market forces.

I tend to see poetry as performative—or dramatistic—an art of contingencies wherein beauty results from symbolic actions derived for particular situations. I like the projected images and the sound and feel of the space of the poem. I like the physical fact of the words in my mouth and in my ear. I like to be delighted and encouraged by a poem and I like to feel at times overwhelmed by its graces. I like to talk back to a poem or to challenge its claims to authority. I like to follow its trails and traces, learning what I can of the world.

Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” is one of those poems for me that oozes in a state of delicate, trembling uncertainty. It’s nothing more than a poem about a young man trying to hush his crying babe in the moonlight. Perhaps my identification with this basic human feeling makes me susceptible to the particular arrangement of language. And yet, the situation the poem speaks to is common to many, and in that commonality we share much. There’s a density of symbolic energy in the poem: fear, hope, desire, etc. The situation in Coleridge’s life influences how I see the poem, too. He’s not yet dumped the family entirely for dope. He’s between places, negotiating his life in a poem that on the surface offers little but a note of love for a child. But that love is embedded in a density of life and a tightly wound unification of image and prosody, sympathetic inquiry and earnest quest, that detonate some greater form of awareness in him. A square rhetorician might ask, "Well, then, what does this poem do" while the professor of Literature might inquire, “Tell me, what does it mean". To me, the poem doesn’t remain beautiful and useful because of some innate aesthetic virtue, but because it makes me think for a moment about what it is to be here, alive to the forces of the world. Like Coleridge, who at the time wanted to be a better man, the poem challenges me to do the same. It asks that we slow down and listen in the stillness for a moment before the next rush of things interferes and destroys that reflection. The Ethos—Coleridge’s projected values—are compelling to me for these reasons.


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Of parallel interest, Don Share shares this from Robin Blaser.