The author examines, using educational poetics as form of aesthetic inquiry, pedagogical practices that incorporate a poetics of leadership activity in preparing educational leaders. In particular, the author draws forward John Dewey's philosophical positioning of aesthetic experience. Poetics involves a deepening of understanding and sensitivity to reasoning and imagination in leadership practice, and mirrors how events, actions, and the conduct of others can all express intellectual, aesthetic, and moral meaning. Poetics as an aesthetic mirror is examined in developing moral literacy and ethical frames of leadership. The author explores how leadership preparation and leadership practice have a significant poetic dimension with respect to the search for personal meaning and the development of authentic understanding. Imaginative projection enables the study of leadership to examine the self as an ethical being. Research findings and exemplars of poetic elements are presented in the study. Four years of research data are reported.