Poetics

“Poetics” refers to the practice and philosophy of poetry and its history. Poetics, broadly conceived, includes poetry, oratory, elocution, art, narrative, music, and performative visual and verbal power. As Aristotle avowed, poetics involves rhetoric, aesthetics, and ethics. A poetics is, implicitly or not, a politics; it functions strategically and socially. A theory of poetics, at core, involves presentation and representation (Halliwell 1998). Both formalist and formally innovative poetics evoke the human, natural, and supernatural world. In African American studies specifically, poetry and poetics have described and decried the inhumane conditions of chattel slavery.