On Eloquence

By Denis Donoghue

(Yale University Press, 2008)

    Distinguished critic Denis Donoghue, University Professor and Henry James Professor of English and American Letters at NYU, argues in this new book that eloquence is not merely a means to a rhetorical end, but rather has as its main attribute its “gratuitousness.”

      Donoghue writes: “Eloquence, as distinct from rhetoric, has no aim:  it is a play of words or other expressive means. Its mode is to be intrinsic.  Like beauty, it claims only the privilege of being a grace note in the culture that permits it.”

      In the course of this meditation on eloquence, Donoghue explores a considerable range of sources, among them the Bible, Shakespeare, George Eliot, Whitman, T.S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens.  He even finds eloquence in Taxi Driver’s hero Travis Bickle’s immortal “You talkin’ to me?