ABSTRACT
The Rhetoric deals with the possibilities of classification in its partisan aspects; it considers the ways in which individuals are at odds with one another, or become identified with groups more or less at odds with one another. The range of images that can be used for concretizing the process of transformation is limited only by the imagination and ingenuity of poets. Contrast the imagery of self-immolation in Matthew Arnold's "Empedocles on Etna," for instance. The imagery could "foretell" homicide only in the sense that it contained an ingredient which, if efficiently abstracted from its humorous modifiers, would in its new purity be homicidal. The Rhetoric deals with the possibilities of classification in its partisan aspects; it considers the ways in which individuals are at odds with one another, or become identified with groups more or less at odds with one another.
