Poetics from the Heart: The Heuristic Strength and the Political Peril of Beautiful Poems

The term ‘poetic’ is often a synonym for beautiful, compelling, euphonious, memorable, stirring, and so on. That leads to an assumption that poetics may reveal only what is beautiful, compelling, euphonious, memorable, stirring, or what have you about discourse – studying poems and/or *unpoems for aesthetic and other evidence of their charisma. A corollary would be that poetics cannot offer insights into uncharismatic discourse. This article asks whether the label poetic might be as much a problem as it is a commendation, having regard to discursive contexts in which a sense of heightened aesthetics may prove highly prejudicial. It brings that question to the task of closely reading the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart, along with two prime ministers’ speeches in response to the Statement. It shows how a widespread imposition of the poetic ideal onto the Statement’s highly crafted rhetoric served to caricature and even traduce the Statement and its intentions. Australia’s 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart and two prime ministers’ speeches in response to the Statement are well-known examples of public discourse. Closely reading them in combination demonstrates how a public utterance and its reception may be governed by a discourse-limiting idealism about the ‘poetic’.