CALIPH: Ah, if there shall ever arise a nation whose people have forgotten poetry or whose poets have forgotten the people, though they send their ships around Taprobane and their armies across the hills of Hindustan, though their city be greater than Babylon of old, and though they mine a league into earth or mount to the stars on wings – what of them? be not afraid. The figures — all the different twists of language that rhetoric describes — are sometimes called the flowers of rhetoric. Think of these words as the botanical names for those flowers, If you’re accustomed to thinking of rhetoric as dealing only with fancy language, think again. Rhetoric is present in the plain style as much as in the high. One of the best-known figures, erotema, the

covering everything from the repetition of sounds to the repetition of larger ideas and arguments. So it’s not a paradox to say that your repetition can be various. Repeat, but do not be repetitive. Using classical techniques is not, in itself, a different approach to writing: it’s simply a way of thinking more consciously about what you’re doing. Terms such as antithesis, which is the technique

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These last 30 years in the UK, coping or not coping with national and international responsibilities, it’s been a pleasure and a release to delve into the anthology for words of support and strength and for echoes of fellow-travellers through the ups and downs of life. Right now, with my condition, I find solace.

In the book the poems are arranged in themes: Music, Mystery and Magic ; Good Fighting ; Love And All That ; The Call Of The Wild ; Conversation Pieces ; The Lighter Side ; Hymns of Hate ; Ragbag ; Last Post. Now think about this: what part of our lives, our experiences, our triumphs and disasters, would not fit under those headings? Most of mine have, and still do. Over the years I’ve used the book often, with little attempt to memorise any of it but knowing where to look for favourites and answers. A few short ones have stayed in the memory however, and the rhythm of many others. We take other men’s knowledge and opinions upon trust; which is an idle and superficial learning. We must make it our own. We are in this very like him, who having need of fire, went to a neighbor’s house to fetch it, and finding a very good one there, sat down to warm himself without remembering to carry any with him home… What good does it do us to have the stomach full of meat, if it do not digest, if it be not incorporated with us, if it does not nourish and support us? advancing your argument. Any sentence you write should be pulling one or more of those levers; the best will do all three. Even apparent decoration works to a purpose — if a phrase is beautiful, funny or Three centuries later, Thoreau — another of humanity’s most quotable and overquoted minds — made a similar point about the perils of mindlessly parroting the ideas of those who came before us, which produces only simulacra of truth. The mindful reflection and expansion upon existing ideas and views, on the other hand, is a wholly different matter — it is the path via which we arrive at more considered opinions of our own, cultivate our critical faculties, and inch closer to truth itself. Montaigne writes: In Libya, in the Sahara, the oilmen wouldn’t have been interested so Other Men’s Flowers was my private comfort. In Saudi Arabia there were times when stress levels were high and I needed to remind myself of the monumental pressures borne by others such as Wavell, and of the humanity that still shone through them.

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Neal Brown, Matthew Collings, Sarah Kent, Tracey Emin: I need art like I need God, exhibition catalogue, Jay Jopling and South London Gallery, London 1997

Wavell was clearly an awkward customer. In his introduction, he apologises for his notes on the poems, saying "'The Notes' are not altogether my fault, the publisher asked for them." But he was far from a bluff fool who kept himself going on the march with a few verses of Kipling. He knew that a key to poetry's success - you might say its departed success - was its memorability, but he also knew that that wasn't its only quality. In 1961, 11 years after his death, TS Eliot wrote, "I do not pretend to be a judge of Wavell as a soldier . . . What I do know from personal acquaintance with the man, is that he was a great man. This is not a term I use easily ..." Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.

The tricolon, putting phrases into groups of three, is perennially effective. Once you start to notice these — be they in newspaper articles, politicians’ speeches or TV advertisements (that’s My wife and I were given this medium-sized book of faves as a wedding present 48 years ago. Our copy was long since lost (probably loaned out), but I remember the volume because every poem in it had been committed to memory by the compiler, a distinguished military man. The introduction said, I think, that he memorized a poem a day. I can't tell you for sure a single work that was in it, yet know there were a lot of really good ones, literally memor[iz]able. Wait! I bet a tenner that Invictus is there, and a fiver that Break , break break is, too. First, consider the three R’s — repetition, repetition and repetition. Richard A. Lanham’s authoritative “A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms” lists no fewer than 36 figures of repetition I have held this book, Other Men’s Flowers, close to me for 50 years. In different places and at different times it has been an interest, a companion, a comfort, an inspiration, and a saviour. It was the first volume that came to mind when I let the memory wander through the decades: Cambridge, Sudan, Libya, Saudi Arabia, global travel, UK executive life, career and performance counselling, volunteering and more. I am in love with the book.

You might know it already. In 1941, in the darkest days of the Second World War, in the few months between staving off the German assault on the Middle East and then turning to meet the challenge of Japan, Field-Marshal Earl Wavell listed his favourite poems for a ‘family conversation’, a small pleasantry to take their minds off those threatening times. Family members reminded him of others that he knew. Two years later, when he was Viceroy of India, the anthology was published. An instant success. an example right there) — the little monkeys are everywhere. Lists, in general, work well. Try enumeratio: setting out your points one by one, to give the impression of clarity and command. Half a millennium before Mark Twain proclaimed that “substantially all ideas are second-hand” and long before we drained the term “curation” of meaning by compulsive and indiscriminate application, Montaigne observed:The project has produced an exciting and innovative publication that intrinsically embodies the elegant but underused printing technique of letterpress … that has allowed and encouraged many hitherto solely image-based artists an opportunity to operate within the realms of 'copy writing', providing them with a platform from which to sound off any phrase, slang discovery, polemical essay or related literary form … the participants produced works that responded to the given brief of a letterpress printed text piece. (Quoted in Cooper, p.116.) Open a book of rhetorical terms, and you will meet a lot of gnarly looking Greek and Latin words. Apodioxis and epizeuxis sound like diseases you wouldn’t especially want to catch. But, pilgrim, I have gathered a posy of other men’s flowers, and nothing but the thread that binds them is mine own. Perhaps it was the start of that sense of ‘future nostalgia’, the awareness that a golden period of life was coming to an end, that what was to come would be very alien and very different, and that perhaps something that could remind me of the western world, and particularly of the British world (all I knew at the time) would be valuable. It turned out to be invaluable.