Will and Poets: Implications for the Teaching of Rhetoric and Writing

Abstract

Do poets have free-will? It is so that law, such as we see in our law system, means free-will. As Blackstone wrote: The absolute rights of man, considered as a free agent, endowed with discernment to know good from evil, and with power of choosing those measures which appear to him to be most desirable, are usually summed up in one general appellation, and denominated the natural liberty of mankind. This natural liberty consists properly in a power of acting as one thinks fit, without any restraint or control, unless by the law of nature; being a right inherent in us by birth, and one of the gifts of God to man at his creation, when he endued him with the faculty of free-will.(Commentaries on the Laws of England 125). But do poets have free-will, or, do we do well to act as if they do? If poets, or, as we may call them, rhetors, people who create texts of human-ness, have free-will or do not have free-will (or if we do better to act as if they do, or act as if they do not do) — the answer to this question has implications for the teaching of rhetoric and writing. This paper simply reviews this truth, especially drawing in some recent scholarship and the words of poets themselves telling about what they think they are doing when they are doing their poeting. This paper is trying to show that though perhaps the language the scholars who write about rhetoric and the teaching of rhetoric and writing are using is not exactly the language of “free-will,” the concept is there. And especially this paper will focus on the use of imitation exercises in the teaching of rhetoric and writing, and how notions of free-will in poets are implicated in the use, or the desire for the use.