Rhetoric and Poetics

30. Rhetoric and Poetics: How to Use the Inevitable Return of the RepressedCharles Altieri

Our instructions for this volume were to engage our respective topics from the point of view of a rhetorician. But for my topic this instruction creates significant problems. I doubt that it is possible at this historical juncture to think like a rhetorician and give an adequate theoretical account of relations between rhetoric and poetry. On the one hand, rhetoric now holds the upper hand, so that assuming the rhetorician's role makes it very difficult not to let self-congratulation shape one's thinking. Conversely, poetry is now in so abject a cultural position among intellectuals that its strictures against such self-congratulation are not likely to penetrate very far into the rhetorician's self-definitions. Yet since Romanticism at least, poetics has often founded itself on constitutive oppositions to rhetoric, so there is no escaping the contrast. The best strategy then might be to make the best case I can for the uses poets made of these oppositions. Maintaining traditional oppositions is not exactly the noblest of contemporary intellectual practices, especially in cases like this one where in practice rhetoric and poetry are often intricately intertwined. But by choosing this path we at least give poetry a place to stand in the public sphere. And, more important, by defending the poet's positive assertions we can establish a framework of oppositions that then can be used ... log in or subscribe to read full text