The Claims of Rhetoric: Toward a Historical Poetics (1820-1900)

The study of nineteenth-century American poetry confirms the mutual reference between literary work and other modes of rhetoric. In the nineteenth century, poetry had a vibrant and active role within ongoing discussions defining America and its cultural directions. The notion of poetry as a self-enclosed aesthetic realm; as a formal object to be approached through more or less exclusively specified categories of formal analysis; as metahistorically transcendent; and as a text deploying a distinct and poetically "pure" language: these notions seem only to begin to emerge at the end of the nineteenth century, in a process that is itself peculiarly shaped in response to social and historical no less than aesthetic trends. Within the course of the nineteenth century itself, such an enclosed poetic realm seems not to have been assumed, except as an anxiety and as a looming threat within American culture itself. Instead, poetry directly participated in and addressed the pressing issues facing the new nation.

Walt Whitman of course figures as the outstanding example of such a vision of poetry as participating in American public and cultural life. But he is only the greatest exemplar of a fundamental impulse in nineteenth-century poetic enterprise. At the same time, anxiety over the place of art within evolving American cultural commitments is a recurrent pressure on many of the writers of the period, as a feared deformation of American promise. In the face of this pressure, poets offer a range of responses. However, these invariably devote poetic vision to political, social, religious, and moral concerns, as well as aesthetic ones. Poetry is conceived as actively participating in the national life; and this also profoundly shapes the poet's conception of him- and herself and his and her role in society.

"Poetry and Public Discourse," my contribution to the Cambridge History of American Literature, volume 4, approaches poetry as a distinctive formal field on which the rhetorics of nineteenth-century American culture find intensified expression, concentration, reflection, and command. The literary force, not to say genius, of a writer often entails a mastery of the rhetorical constructions widely available in his or her surrounding culture. Poetic representation reflects, but also gives a heightened definition and self-consciousness to, general rhetorical constructions, in ways that may both reinforce and critique them. It is one argument of this study that poetry gains not only historical grounding but also aesthetic coherence and illumination through study of its transformative relationship to the rhetorics that surround it. This is not to collapse or deny all aesthetic difference. Distinctions remain between greater and lesser poetic mastery, itself illuminated through an investigation of how each situates the other and provides a necessary matrix for reading the other. Nor is it to reduce literature to historical or ideological reproduction of social experience. It is rather to claim that literature has its origins and its reference in abroad range of historical experiences, as mediated through rhetorical practices among other factors. Values, attitudes, interests, and cultural directions at large in the society are expressed through rhetorical tropes, which in turn reemerge in poetry, marking such specifically poetic structures as voice, imagery, setting, self-representation, and address. Conversely, poetic representation foregrounds and sharpens the terms of a culture's rhetorical configurations. Thus, far from negating the specifically literary nature of a poetic text, rhetorical context illuminates and affirms poetry's cultural importance and aesthetic power.

Rhetoric thus provides a site where literature intersects with other forms of discourse. In this study, I have focused on a set of rhetorical topics that cross literary and cultural-historical discourses. In each case, a vital American concern is approached through a rhetorical mode shared by both poetry and its surrounding social worlds. The first topic investigates the rhetoric of modesty as this situates nineteenth-century American women poets. It is a given of much nineteenth-century historical and literary study that women's lives were circumscribed within a...