We continue with traditional poetry, and in this issue concentrate on a poem's shaping. Rhetoric was the name the classical world gave to the devices at a writer's disposal, and these were grouped under taxis and lexis. Taxis, or the structure of argument, shows how lines and phrases work on our affective understanding.
Rhetoric now has a bad name.
Originally it meant the effective use of language - not only to sway the ignorant mob but to persuade our intellectual peers. And by governing such matters as laying out an argument, presenting the evidence, employing the appropriate syntax and diction, rhetoric was unavoidable - in law, politics, literature and everyday life. Rhetoric even disallows thought, pre-determining what our public ideologues must say. Perhaps for this reason contemporary poetry has become rather prosaic, even pedestrian, taking for granted that plainness bespeaks sincerity. But rhetoric has not disappeared.