John Stuart Mill and Rhetoric: The Perspicuous Account of Truthful Obscurity

Abstract

Approaches Mill’s essays on poetry as a timely application of romantic (as opposed to pragmatic) rhetorical theory to some new problems posed by the growing marketplace of letters. Claims Mill’s arguments about the nonemphatic nature of poetry in “What is Poetry?” and “The Two Kinds of Poetry,” and his development of a Romantic method of critical reading in his essay on Tennyson, provide an early-Victorian solution to the problem of critical truth and sincerity by separating the discourses of poetry and philosophy from the perceived corrupting effects of an increasingly rhetorical and affected mode of periodical prose writing.