Nebula 7.1/7.2, June 2010 Clark: Towards a public poetics of Obama and Beowulf 71 Ideology, Prosody, and Eponymy: Towards a Public Poetics of Obama and Beowulf. By Tom Clark Abstract This article examines and integrates the categories of poetics and rhetoric by comparing concepts of the poetic in Barack Obama's 2008 election victory speech with concepts of political rhetoric in the Old English long poem Beowulf. Using close readings, the paper explores a nexus between these two modes of communication which is revealed both in the politicisation of poetry and in the poetical praxis of political communications. That is, practitioners in both domains necessarily follow the integrating logics that this paper explores. It finds a political aesthetic of sceptical conservatism that underwrites the agendas of both these epic-heroic texts. Keywords Public poetics; Barack Obama; Beowulf; rhetoric; poetic formula. Each thing in this world had, as it were, an eponym in heaven, a perfect form from which it was derived — and it shared this derivation with all the other members of its class, or genus. — Kenneth Burke 1 1. Introduction There is a view, which I vehemently support, that public language is a type of poetry, and that public speaking is therefore a type of performance poetry. Public language – by which I mean language produced for publics and/or by public figures and/or in a public situation and/or with a view to public purposes 2 – answers to priorities other- than-artistic, as we know. But it is not always distinct, of course — there has always been poetry oriented towards the public sphere, and there is no shortage of public sphere discourse that gets called ‗poetic.‘ In other words, this paper 3 explores an 1 Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives and a Rhetoric of Motives, Meridian Books, Cleveland, 1962, p. 27. 2 For a working definition of ‗public‘ in this sense I am heavily reliant on the criteria set out in Warner‘s signature essay, ‗Publics and Counterpublics‘ (notwithstanding some caveats discussed in section 3). See Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, Zone Books, New York, 2002, pp. 65-124. 3 This paper is based on a seminar I presented to the School of Communication and the Arts at Victoria University (Melbourne). In developing it, I have also been grateful to receive advice from Alex Jones, Alison Clark, and Daniel Drache.