Chapter 5: Rhetoric, Poetics and Poetry by: Liza, Samantha, Laura and Conor

In this chapter, Culler aims to define both poetry and rhetoric, citing both their differences and the ways in which they are connected. He begins by crediting Aristotle as the one who first separated the two, rhetoric being the art of persuasion and poetry being the art of imitation. The two forms were integrated and separated a few more time by history, until the late twentieth century when rhetoric was revived as the “study of the structuring powers of discourse” (Culler 69). Poetry, on the other hand, is said to be “language that makes abundant use of figures of speech and language that aims to be powerfully persuasive” (Culler 69).

Culler goes on to list a few rhetorical “figures” that literary theorists find important in both poetry and rhetoric. There is lists of four that theorists agree are the most significant: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. There are obviously many more figures of speech that are important in both rhetoric and poetry, but these four “master tropes” are the most basic structures by which “we make sense of experience.”

Poetry is one medium through which poets aim to make that sense. Poetry, as Culler defines, can be seen in many different ways, such as either a structure (the actual words on a page meant to be read) or an event (the act of the poet or the experience of the reader). Poetry can be defined through the relationship of the author to the speaker, and by extension, that of the speaker to the reader. Especially in lyric, it is crucial to make the distinction between the voice that speaks the poem and the poet who created it, for the author may not be intending for their voice to narrate. This distinction is also linked to genre, as the Greeks divided their works according to who speaks. There are three: poetic or lyric, where the narrator speaks in first person; epic or narrative, where the narrator has a voice but there is also dialogue spoken by other characters; and finally drama, where the characters are the only ones that speak.

As previously stated, rhetoric and poetry are closely linked. In poetry, rhetorical devices are used to exaggerate and sometimes hyperbolize the human experience. Culler means to treat poems on a different level than other forms of rhetoric. Poems are simply “explorations in poetics” through the use of those rhetorical devices, and at their basest sense, are attempts at creating meaning from our experiences.