I wasn't being completely serious, really. What I meant about oratory vs. poetry is that an orator is attempting to convince an audience, as is a poet - an orator of some temporal nonsense, a poet of his evaluation of his theme. Poetry is much more elegantly convincing - as demonstrated by Neitzsche, who wrote in poetic language, and Goethe.
As a sidenote, my ethnocentrism was light-hearted (and I know it was ethnocentrist, but I'm British, that's my job); I do, however, think that English is simply more conducive towards certain types of communication; or rather that every language is. German may be conducive towards rhetoric. Going by my argument that the best speeches are written down and become poems, it's likely that the best one would be written in a language whose rules and vocabulary encourage poetry - like English. Objectively speaking, we do have the most words and one of the loosest grammars. That's not to say that there's not very worthy poetry in other languages.
For another example, I think French is very conducive towards literature - Camus, Dumas, Verne, Proust, etc.; or Latin is a good language for speeches - and I've studied Latin poetry, so I know that it exists and that it's very good. I just think that Cicero's speeches are more essentially Roman than the Aeneid or any of the elegists.
