Having poetry as the seventh of the liberal arts might seem a bit odd, especially when one is used to see astronomy in this position, as the last of the upper division, the quadrivium. One has to remember that in the Middle Ages, poetry was seen as a part of grammar, and then again as a part of rhetoric. Either way, it was a serious language-related study and as such seen not only as equal to the language related arts, but even as the culmination of them all rolled up in one. equal to .