Rhetoric and Poetics in the English Department: Our Nineteenth-Century Inheritance

Abstract

During most of this century, Departments of English in America have paid little attention to the relationship between rhetoric and poetics. With the notable exception of Kenneth Burke, I. A. Richards, and some members of the Chicago School, those who have addressed the issue at all have usually looked upon rhetoric as a subordinate discipline, relegating it to the domain of language in the scientific or rational realms. Poetics is declared the primary business of English studies, constituting the central concern (or even the sole concern) of the department.1 Literary texts thus enjoy a privileged status while rhetorical texts are regarded as meriting little or no attention. This diminution of rhetoric as a discipline worthy of serious study is, however, a historical anomaly of the late nineteenth century. Prior to that period rhetoric was almost invariably considered at least as important as poetics in the education of the young, at all levels of formal training. In this essay I shall explore the process that led to the mutual isolation of rhetoric and poetics, an isolation resulting in the sanctification of poetics and a corresponding denigration of rhetoric. Recognizing the singularity of the contemporary conception of the rhetoricpoetics distinction requires a glance at the relation of the two disciplines in the past. In this case it is best to begin at the beginning, considering the two as they were conceived in the Greece of Aristotle and the Rome of Cicero and Quintilian. I realize that the description to be offered is a simplification, a model of complete balance and harmony more desired than attained at any historical moment, even during the time of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian. Still this conceptual scheme will provide useful distinctions in considering rhetoric and poetics in nineteenth-century America. In ancient Greece and Rome rhetoric and poetics were commonly defined in relation to each other. As Charles Sears Baldwin indicates in Ancient Rhetoric