This paper is a comparative study of Aristotle's Poetics and Ezra Pound's ABC of Reading to discover and determine values in literature, especially poetry, which reflect on the nature and the manifestations of human communication. I feel that scholars in the field of communication can benefit personally and academically from exposure to those poets who have expr essed themselves on the reasons or the manners in which people communicate. To pursue this question requires the use of a guide to poetry, a method by which I can learn to recognize a poem on sight; so that when it comes to discourse about the communicative values of poetry, I can be assured that it is poetry and not some other thing which would be the subject of discourse. The guide is called a poetics. From among the various texts on poetics I have selected these two because not only do they contain scholarship and observation of extraordinary acumen, but also because a comparison between the two can produce valuable similarities and differences, which are of further use in establishing values for a given text of poetics.