Dramatic Poetry as Rhetorical Form: The Case of Sarah Piatt’s “Mock Diamonds”

ABSTRACT:The programmatic study of narrative and poetry has stalled without engaging many approaches to narrative inquiry and without comprehending the sui generis achievements of poetical representation. This essay attempts to rejuvenate narratological and specifically rhetorical interest in poetry by carefully examining the dramatic poem—where poetic form intersects with several of narrative theory’s abiding enthusiasms: character, voice, perspective, performance. Marrying theoretical speculation to both practical criticism and literary history, the argument extrapolates from Sarah Piatt’s “Mock Diamonds” a twofold rhetoric of the dramatic-poetic mode. It posits first that, often through segmentation and related phenomena, dramatic poems formally enact a competition between individual communicants and the discursive contexts that threaten to supplant their perspectival authority. Second, it maintains that dramatic poems coordinate a dialogic interplay between (1) character speech, whose semantic content manifests the character-speaker’s intentions, and (2) versification, whose formal qualities signify outside the represented scene. The recitative performance conventionally mandated by poetry integrates these two communicative channels such that they mean the embodied expression they specify together. That culminative detail underscores the essay’s broadest implication: namely, that poetry’s emphases on readerly enactment and sonic, somatic, and typographic patterning generate rhetorical effects not readily available in other representational discourses. Dramatic poetry, as epitomized by “Mock Diamonds,” demonstrates the power of poetic form to renovate, and hence to augment, prevailing theories of even the most familiar narrative constituents.