nator that came into use only in the eighteenth century,^6 whereas discus-
sions of the poetic have a much more ancient and cross-cultural lineage. The
discipline of poetics (which, from Plato through the nineteenth century,
comprised narrative and drama as well as lyric) has been classi¤ed in four
basic ways:
(1) The poetic may be understood as a branch of rhetoric. From Aristotle’s
profound understanding of rhetoric as the art (techné) of ¤nding the avail-
able means of persuasion, to Cicero and Quintilian’s division of rhetoric into
three tasks—docere (to teach), delectare (to delight), and movere (to move)—
and three faculties—inventio (the ¤nding of arguments), dispositio (the ar-
rangement into parts), and elocutio (style)^7 —to the handbooks of the me-
dieval rhetoricians like Geoffrey of Vinsauf, to the late-eighteenth-century
manuals of Hugh Blair and George Campbell, to the rhetorical hermeneutics
of the contemporary Groupe Mu,^8 rhetoric has ®ourished as the study of how
a piece of writing is put together. It has gradually evolved from its early pre-
scriptive character (the description of rhetorical devices and strategies nec-
essary to teach, delight, or move a given audience) to the more empirical
study of what ¤gures and devices actually are used in literary and nonliterary
composition. Rhetoric thus means primarily practical criticism—the exami-
nation of diction and syntax, rhy thm and repetition, and the various ¤gures
of speech.
But effective rhetoric, as Aristotle ¤rst demonstrated in what is still the
great treatment of the subject, is no mere “ornament,” as the tropes and rhe-
torical ¤gures used to be called, but a matter of ethos and pathos: the artful
presentation of a self designed to be persuasive to its audience, and the con-
struction of an audience that will empathize with that self. To take some
Renaissance examples, if Philip Sidney provides us with an excellent example
of the ethical argument (in his case, the sprezzatura that makes us sympa-
thize with Astrophel in the sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella, as with
the charmingly modest speaker of The Defense of Poetry), John Donne is the
master of the pathetic argument: the urgent and passionate appeal to the
poet’s (and preacher’s) fellow sinners to be at one with his suffering.
As such, rhetoric is at the very center of our discipline as literary scholars.
No other discipline, after all, has as its central focus the issue as to how
language actually works and what it does, whether in newspaper editorials
or poems or the weather report. Conversely, inattention to rhetoric, as in
Harold Bloom’s otherwise powerful poetry criticism, downgrades the ma-
teriality of the text at the expense of its dominant my ths and ideas, thus
occluding the signi¤cant differences between, say, a Wallace Stevens poem
6Chapter 1