Rhetoric is the art of making claims. As such, it has often been suspected of being narrowly strategic and interested, if not distorting. But it can also be claimed that, instead of only putting forward some particular argument, rhetoric broadly structures experience in so far as this is mediated by language and expressed through language. To study rhetoric is then to study fundamental patterns in a culture, as made evident and pursued through its varied discourses. In this sense, rhetoric provides a site where literature intersects with other forms of discourse, and not least public ones. The rhetorical modes of a culture penetrate literary representation, while literature derives its materials through such rhetorical matrices, but in ways that are more self-conscious, self-reflective, and directed to its own ends.

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; constituted as a formal object to be approached through more or less exclusively specified categories of formal analysis; conceived as meta-historically transcendent; and 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 which 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.