In this article the author intends to offer to the reader one more possibility of reading and interpretation of the terms poetics and short story, since the semantic load of these terms has suffered deep variations in the 20th century. Regarding Poetics, the author comments on the use and abuse of the term, mainly in academic circles. He shows the etymological relationship of poetics and poetry and the poem, and emphasises Rhetoric; and the different significance that the term is taking at the present time, becoming synonymous with a simple «study»; and people frequently refer to a «poetics of the author», or «of a time, or «of the metaphor»,...