Abstract: When lyric poets in late Renaissance England responded to the demand for wonder in poetry and all courtly activity by astonishing audiences through style, they drew upon the Greek rhetorical tradition, which presents roughness and obscurity as coordinate methods of making style deinos, or admirable. In the Life of Cowley, Samuel Johnson also sees roughness and obscurity as coordinate qualities in the verse of the “metaphysical poets” he says erred in pursuit of wonder. Before admirable style went out of fashion, poet-critics praised its ability to provoke the audience's inferences and to transcend persuasión by “ravishing” the audience's will, precisely the effects that Demetrius attributes to the charaktēr deinos in On Style. Yet deinolēs is the term used to describe both the most powerful style and the clever style of sophistic epideixis, and this breadth of meaning helps explain both the rise and fall of wit.

Research Article| May 01 1988 Samuel Johnson on Letters James Biester James Biester Department of Comparative Literature, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1988) 6 (2): 145–166. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1988.6.2.145 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation James Biester; Samuel Johnson on Letters. Rhetorica 1 May 1988; 6 (2): 145–166. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1988.6.2.145 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1988, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1988 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.