Mark Doty Tide Of Voices Why Poetry Matters Now Ethos

In any given speech, or piece of literature for that matter, there is a certain amount of pathos, logos, and ethos used by the author, a technique that people like to call the “Rhetorical Triangle”. In the thought provoking speech: “Tide of Voices: Why Poetry Matters Now”, the speaker spectacularly uses these tactics to prove the validity, importance, and beauty of poetry. Mark Doty, the author, is a recognized American poet, who was the winner of the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008. This accomplishment on its own establishes ethos, a form of trust and credibility. Obviously, a poet defending poetry is as expected as a mathematician defending mathematics, but still, the reliability and status is there. The article, as aforementioned, is basically a palette of evidence trying to prove why poetry is such a crude and raw form of language and expression, and why it still matters.

During his speech, he occasionally throws in some facts or scientific phenomena to create a feeling of logos, and to encourage the idea that his claims are solid enough to be backed up by science. For example, when he uses the “I feel sick” template to prove the marvelous ways poetry can manipulate language, he counts and uses to his advantage the amount of times a mouth moves as it pronounces, “‘“I hear my ill spirit sob in each blood cell’”(Doty). Furthermore, he later goes on to explain the science and the basics of speech, saying “A voice is a physical production, the product of breath, larynx, voice box, mouth, tongue and nasal passages...” (Doty). He then uses this to prove how distinct poetry can be, based on such trivial things such as