Francis Bacon And The ‘Desserts Of Poetry’

Abstract

Francis Bacon was regularly critical of rhetoric. In The Advancement of Learning, he argues that rhetoric distorts our understanding of Nature and Philosophy; rather than laboring to understand matter better, we settle for ‘Images of matter … to fall in Love with them, is to fall in love with a picture.’ Modern critics, such as Wilbur Samuel Howell, Karl Wallace and Brian Vickers, focus upon Bacon's effective use of rhetoric in his legal career and upon his positive theoretical statements on rhetoric in order to demonstrate that he ultimately valued the art. In this essay I argue that Bacon's most meaningful statements on rhetoric were not really about the art of rhetoric – the ‘art of speaking well’ – but about humanist rhetorical education and how it limited scientific thinking.

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