The Elements of Eloquence: Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase

by Mark Forsyth

Shakespeare wasn’t different. Shakespeare got better and better and better, which was easy because he started badly, like most people starting a new job.

And that was just following on from Henry Peacham’s The Garden of Eloquence, which had come out a decade earlier. Book after book was published, all about the figures of rhetoric. So I should probably explain what the figures of rhetoric are.

you. One minuscule part of this massive subject is the figures of rhetoric, which are the techniques for making a single phrase striking and memorable just by altering the wording. Not by saying something different, but by saying something in a different way. They are the formulas for producing great lines.

The “flowers of rhetoric” as they were called (hence The Garden of Eloquence), because, as a

nation, we were at the time rather obsessed with poetry.

“I can smile, and murder while I smile” was not handed to Shakespeare by God. It’s just an example of diacope.

Stern people dislike rhetoric, and unfortunately it’s usually stern people who are in charge: solemn fools who believe that truth is more important than beauty.

poet is not somebody who has great thoughts. That is the menial duty of the philosopher. A poet is somebody who expresses his thoughts, however commonplace they may be, exquisitely. That is the one and only difference between the poet and everybody else.