According to Culler, poetry is related to rhetoric in which poetry is the language that makes abundant use of figures of speech and language that aim to be powerfully persuasive.  In Derek Walcott’s poem “The Sea is History”, he uses unique rhetorical figures at the beginning of the poem “in that grey vault. The sea. The sea has locked them up. The sea is History”  to show the charm of the poem. As Culler mentioned in the  chapter, Metaphor has been treated as basic language and the imagination because it is cognitively respectable, not inherently frivolous or ornamental,  it is the part which I am interested in. Literature depends on rhetorical figures but also on larger structures, particularly literary genres, genres are sets of conventions and expectations. poetry as word and act, the relative importance of different ways of viewing poems is that a poem is both a structure made of words and an event which is an act of the poet, an experience of the reader, an event in literary history. The extravagance of the lyric is another factor of rhetoric, lyric shows us the meaning of the story emerging from verbal patterning. You repeat words that echo in a rhythmical structure and see if a story or sense won’t emerge. Rhythmic words are the scandal of poetry that ‘contingent’ features of sound and rhythm systematically infect and affect thought. Interpreting the poem is the last rhetoric which Culler mentioned in chapter five, don’t treat the poem as we might a bit of conversation, a fragment that needs a larger context to explain it, but assume that it has a structure of its own.

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