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

by Mark Forsyth

A 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.

Shakespeare did not consider himself sacred. He would often just steal content from other people. However, whatever he stole he improved, and he improved it using the formulas, flowers and figures of rhetoric.

Oscar Wilde was the master of these, with lines like, “The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.”

As T. S. Eliot put it: “Immature poets imitate. Mature poets steal.”

Heav’n has no rage, like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury, like a woman scorned.

“pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall”; universally remembered as “pride goes before a fall.”

Most of Wilde’s paradoxes are not paradoxes at all. They are simply simple thoughts expressed in a terribly surprising way.

Oscar Wilde said that “We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities”

The only reason that T. S. Eliot insisted on the middle initial was that he was painfully aware of what his name would have been without it, backwards.

Tennyson’s great line To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield

His general theory was that unclear language reflected unclear thought,

“If at last the long story [of Britain] is to end, it were better it should end, not through surrender, but only when we are rolling senseless on the ground.”

For though we have nothing to say, we can at least say it well.