GG argues that it is rhetoric which propels the significant articulation of feeling & conscience, ie. that rhetoric is motivated by an ethical demand.

& if poetry is distinguished from rhetoric, then it shuts itself off from the ethical/moral challenges of the present time.

My sense, rather, is that there is an unspoken ethos and a natural law - which is expressed in different & distinguishable ways - through poetry on the one hand, and through rhetoric (or discourse) on the other.