Ancient rhetoric and poetic : Interpreted from representative works by Baldwin
"Ancient Rhetoric and Poetic: Interpreted from Representative Works" by Charles Sears Baldwin is a scholarly treatise written in the early 20th century. It surveys classical theories of rhetoric and poetics through representative authors to recover practical principles of composition for modern readers. The work argues for a twofold view of composition—rhetoric as public, logical persuasion and poetic as imaginative movement—while tracing how ancient practice informs medieval pedagogy and Renaissance criticism. The opening
of the book sets out the author’s purpose and method in a preface: to let figures like Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and the author of “On the Sublime” speak for themselves, with a strict focus on composition and a deliberate exclusion of metrics. Chapter I distinguishes rhetoric from poetic not by verse versus prose, but by the kind of movement—idea-to-idea for rhetoric versus image-to-image for poetic—while acknowledging shared stylistic resources and emphasizing the pedagogical value of the distinction. Chapter II then begins a sustained reading of Aristotle’s Rhetoric: Book I defines rhetoric as discerning the available means of persuasion (with the enthymeme as its chief instrument) and maps deliberative, forensic, and occasional speech with their core topics. Book II shifts to the audience, analyzing emotions and character types to guide ethical adaptation. Book III turns to the speech itself—diction, rhythm, the periodic sentence, delivery, and the traditional parts—arguing that prose should be rhythmical but not metrical, and that vivid metaphor, energetic presentation, and apt arrangement make ideas act “before the eyes.” (This is an automatically generated summary.)
Read or download for free
For an overview of the different reading options, see our Reading Guide
| Reading Options | Url | Size | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Read now! | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76707.html.images | 809 kB | |||
| EPUB3 (E-readers incl. Send-to-Kindle) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76707.epub3.images | 473 kB | |||
| EPUB (older E-readers) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76707.epub.images | 480 kB | |||
| EPUB (no images, older E-readers) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76707.epub.noimages | 351 kB | |||
| Kindle | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76707.kf8.images | 711 kB | |||
| older Kindles | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76707.kindle.images | 670 kB | |||
| Plain Text UTF-8 | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76707.txt.utf-8 | 541 kB | |||
| Download HTML (zip) | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/76707/pg76707-h.zip | 391 kB | |||
| There may be more files related to this item. | |||||
Similar Books
About this eBook
| Author | Baldwin, Charles Sears, 1867-1935 |
|---|---|
| Title | Ancient rhetoric and poetic : Interpreted from representative works |
| Original Publication | Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1924, pubdate 1959. |
| Credits | Tor Martin Kristiansen, Stephen Hutcheson and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net |
| Language | English |
| LoC Class | PA: Language and Literatures: Classical Languages and Literature |
| Subject | Rhetoric, Ancient |
| Subject | Poetics -- History -- To 1500 |
| Subject | Classical literature -- History and criticism -- Theory, etc. |
| Category | Text |
| EBook-No. | 76707 |
| Release Date | Aug 19, 2025 |
| Copyright Status | Public domain in the USA. |
| Downloads | 414 downloads in the last 30 days. |
| Project Gutenberg eBooks are always free! | |