ABSTRACT
It’s not always obvious that a poem is a kind of argument. For example, it might be an argument of persuasion, as in, “How do I love thee/Let me count the ways” or an argument of praise—in praise of the king, for example (which is how poet laureates got their jobs), or in praise of God or of life itself. Often the argument is for a political or moral or theological point of view, as in, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” And with increasing frequency in contemporary writing, the argument might be epistemological, that is, about what’s real and how we know what we know.
