Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance. Donald Lemen Clark
non-metrical form of rhetoric, the essentially practical nature of rhetoric marked it off to the Greeks and Romans as something quite different from poetic and infinitely more important in education and public life. But however clear-cut this distinction may be in principle, in practical application there is rarely to be found such ideal isolation.
Aristotle, for instance, carries rhetoric bodily over into poetic by including Thought, διάνοιᾰ, as the third in importance of the constituent elements of tragedy.[75] This Thought is the intellectual element in conduct, and in drama is embodied not in action, but in speech.[76] Aristotle says,
It is the faculty of saying what is possible and pertinent in given circumstances. In the case of oratory, this is the function of the political art and of the art of rhetoric. Concerning thought, we may assume what is said in the Rhetoric, to which inquiry the subject more properly belongs. Under thought is included every effect which has to be produced by speech, the subdivisions being--proof and refutation; the excitation of the feelings, such as pity, fear, anger and the like; the suggestion of importance or its opposite.[77]
This is a transfer of the content of rhetoric to poetic, but poetic remains an art of imitation. Imaginative realization of the life of man would be incomplete if the characters in a narrative or in a drama did not use the same rhetorical art as do the characters of actual life. The poets justly carry over rhetoric when the scene demands it, and have often proved themselves excellent rhetoricians. Quintilian praises the peroration of Priam's speech begging Achilles for the body of Hector,[78] and Cicero gives a rhetorical analysis of the speech of the old man in the Andria of Terence, where the arrangement is especially appropriate to the character of the speaker.[79] Norden, therefore, seems to go too far in giving this as an example of contamination of poetic by rhetoric.[80] Dante remains an excellent poet when he puts into the mouth of Virgil that persuasive speech to Cato in the first canto of the Purgatorio. Antony's speech in Julius Caesar is the best known modern example of the legitimate place of rhetoric in poetic.
5. Poetic as Part of Rhetoric
Just as rhetoric is justly carried over into poetic when in the realization of a character or situation a speech must be made or conduct rationalized, so poetic is constantly utilized by the orator. Public speech would be less persuasive if the characteristic imaginative qualities of poetic were excluded. The ideas and propositions of rhetoric would most ineffectually reach an audience if they were not made vivid. That rhetoric is not thus made synonymous with poetic is due to the fact that in rhetoric the images exist to illuminate the concept, while in poetic they are woven into the movement of the plot. Oratory, like poetry, is emotional, as Longinus asserts.[81] Cicero phrases the aim of the orator as "docere, delectare, et movere," to prove, to delight, to move emotionally.[82] The vividness and emotion, as well as the charm, of poetic are indispensable in attaining the ultimate aim of rhetoric-- persuasion. The orator must be himself moved, according to Quintilian,[83] just as the poet, according to Aristotle.[84] That essential quality, indeed, of poetic, the realization of character and situation which presents vividly a situation or event to the mind's eye of the reader or hearer so that he seems to participate in the action and vicariously live through it, was incorporated into rhetoric as ἐνέγεια, a figure of speech. There petrified in an alien substance, this characteristic quality of poetic was transmitted to another age which knew of it through no other source.[85] Thus a successful orator narrated with descriptive vividness the circumstances, for instance, of a cruel murder, and even dramatized, speaking now in the person of one actor, now of another, the situation which he was endeavoring to realize for his audience. He was thus enabled better to carry his audience with him to his ultimate goal of persuasion.
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