"Modern culture traditionally has viewed rhetoric and poetry as belonging to different worlds: whereas "rhetoric" is practical prose that serves to persuade an audience of the speaker's point of view, "poetry" is aesthetic expression. Jeffrey Walker's study demonstrates that, in fact, in antiquity the two could not be viewed or practiced separately.".

"In reply to traditional rhetorical histories which tend to view "rhetoric" as in essence an art of practical civic oratory, Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity argues in four extended, multi-chapter essays that epideictic and poetic eloquence was central, even fundamental, to the rhetorical tradition in antiquity. This volume also offers a revised rhetorical conception of epideictic and poetic discourse."--BOOK JACKET.