higher speech

A poet of resplendent rhetoric.

[Thinking of Wallace Stevens]

higher order

A command of rhetoric that rose to the level of imagery.

new order rhetoric

A poem that raised rhetoric to a new order.

[Thinking of Amanda Gorman's inaugural poem.]

word order

In Gertrude Stein’s writing the words are rather plain and generic while the rhetoric is particular when it’s not peculiar.

tell it

Necessarily the times had shifted poetry toward rhetoric.

thousands of lines of me

Its critical rhetoric couched in politics and theory, language poetry was perhaps the most self-indulgent of all poetry movements.

more than a game

Dharani, in Japan, means the practice of reciting certain passages from Buddhist scriptures in Sanskrit, without translation, which is said to endow the reciter with a range of virtues. “Rhetoric” (kigyo) is regarded as one of the ten evils in Buddhism as noted earlier. Shinkei, then, equated poetry with Buddhism in absolute terms, and did not even allow the suggestion that poetry may be fiction.

It may be said that the effort to find spiritual grace in poetry peaked more or less with Shinkei, a renga poet and therefore Bashō’s predecessor. At any rate, it was this tradition that affected Bashō as he strove to elevate poetry to something more than a game.

—Hiroaki Sato, On Haiku (New Directions, 2018)

major rhetoric

The dream of a great poem made solely from superior rhetoric.

say it

A poetics not of seeing, but of a way of saying.

[Thinking of Robert Creeley]

telling talk

The poem was rhetoric heavy.

say it

Poet, be courageous in your rhetoric.

in the public square

A symbol monger. An image grinder. A diction trader. A rhetoric freak. A sound dog.

see-saw

The inverse ratio of heft of content to height of rhetoric.

figures in space

The poem’s rhetorical figures reminded one of watching a troupe of acrobats going through their convoluted routines.

idiot thing

To retrieve [important] subject matter will always mean going out into the “objective” world, sitting “down close to the idiot thing”* and then discovering a rhetoric sufficient to treat of it. The enlarged content, which is the fuel for poetry will, in the hands of our best poets, dictate this rhetoric.

—Jonathan Holden, The Fate of American Poetry (Univ. of Georgia Press, 1991)

*excerpt from Scott Cairns’ poem “Harbor Seals” which is featured in the essay.

woven basket

Line after line the poem intricately woven of sound and rhetoric, a beautiful basket that could hold anything or nothing at all.

two kinds of poetry

Great writers must find their distinctive voice, and you can hear Robinson's in "Reuben Bright" (1897). He uses simple rhetoric, the emotion compressed in spare language. As the poet Winfield Townley Scott observed in his notebooks, there are basically two kinds of poetry. One is represented by Hart Crane's line "The seal's wide spindrift gaze toward paradise," the other by Robinson's "And he was all alone there when he died." One is a magic gesture of language, the other "a commentary on human life so concentrated as to give off considerable pressure." The greatest poets combine the two, Scott believed: Shakespeare often, Robinson himself now and then.

—Scott Donaldson, Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet's Life (Columbia University Press. © 2007)