Rhetoric Review Mar 1997

Romantic rhetoric and the rhetorical tradition1

Rex L. Veeder

Abstract

There has been little room for the British Romantics in the study of rhetoric because it is generally agreed that they did not concern themselves with it, but their influence upon academic culture and upon the relationship between literature and rhetoric is a central concern for contemporary studies of rhetoric, composition, and literature.2 Rhetoricians and critics divide Romantic British discourse into the rhetoricians and the poets. Rhetoricians study Hugh Blair, George Campbell, and Richard Whately while theorists study philosophers, critics, and poets such as William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth. Some substantial efforts have been made to include the literary Romantics in our discussion of rhetoric. Don Bialostosky's recent work, Wordsworth, Dialogics, and the Practice of Criticism, for example, gives us a reading of Wordsworth from a dialogical perspective, and in the past rhetoricians of such stature as Kenneth Burke (see Blankenship), I. A. Richards, and Ann E. Berthoff have included Coleridge and Wordsworth in their theories of rhetoric and composition. Still, in the main, rhetoricians regard the British Romantics with distrust.3 the surface the distrust is well earned. The term rhetoric had pejorative associations for the Romantics. Although their philosophical views about rhetoric may be traced to Plato, their belief that rhetoric was a secondary and fraudulent art was the product of a longstanding academic and ecclesiastical debate over the virtues of Ramist rhetoric, where logic afforded the composer the means of thinking and rhetoric afforded the composer a way of presenting those thoughts.4 In this view rhetoric was mechanical, and once the organic experience of creation was over, what was left to the rhetorician was merely gesture or mere rhetoric. The British Romantics' distrust for mere rhetoric led them to write about discourse rather than rhetoric. Coleridge, for example, uses the term method, a term usually associated with Descartes in philosophy and with Ramus in rhetoric, when he writes about rhetorical acts. However, throughout his works, he not only demonstrates a substantial understanding of the history of rhetoric but also includes well-known principles of rhetoric in his method. In his Essays on the Principles of Method, he argues that method is a habit of considering the relationships among things, specifically either their relations to each other, or to the observer, or to the state of apprehension of the hearers (451). Thus, although Coleridge argues against the sophists in On the

Journal
Rhetoric Review
Published
1997-03-01
DOI
10.1080/07350199709359221
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Topics
modern rhetorical theory rhetorical criticism discourse analysis argument
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Citation Context

Cited by in this index (1)

  1. Diller (1998)
    The art of rhetoric: Aesthetics and rhetoric in the American renaissance
    Rhetoric Society Quarterly

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