Other Men's Flowers

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will want to tell you Y… Big Tobacco will want to tell you Z. But there’s something you can tell Big Tobacco…” Its conclusion can be given a sense of roundness and inevitability with 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

An argument can be given gathering force by anaphora, for instance, where a word or phrase is repeated at the beginning of successive sentences: “Big Tobacco will want to tell you X… Big Tobacco

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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 a piece of writing feels like a unit, it lends its argument an impression, however spurious, of coherence. The more each clause or sentence relates to those around it, whether in parallel or counterpoint, intellectually or musically, the more it will feel like an organic whole. Syntax can do much of the work of sense. In the Sudan I shared some of the simpler ones with my local teacher colleagues and the students. The students were learning English language and literature but no poetry, so for them it was an added dimension to the language and culture. 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.)

What accounted for its success? My guess is that it made poetry respectable for manly men - Wavell's section on war is called "Good Fighting" but his section on love a tongue-tied "Love and All That" - in an age when reciteable poetry still had a popular appeal. Looking at it again this week, my wife remembered how her father could recite all of the "Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" and Hilaire Belloc's "Do you remember an Inn, Miranda? / Do you remember an Inn?" My own father could do as well with a lot of the Burns and Coleridge. Both our fathers left school at 14. They had uneducated memories compared with Wavell, who wrote in his introduction that while, nearing 60, he couldn't claim he could repeat by heart all the 260 or so poems in the the anthology, he thought he could safely claim that he once could. I say ‘so far’, not just because I haven’t read the entirety of the collection, but also because I know that this is something I’ll continue to dip into for several years (even when I’m old and gray and full of sleep, perhaps!) Each time I read ‘Other Men’s Flowers’ I am introduced to a new favourite (old) poem. If the classical orators have modern counterparts in the realm of the written word, pre-eminent among those counterparts are the authors of opinion pieces. Here is persuasion overt, persuasion front and center. The Some years ago, when writing a gardening article for an achingly right-on newspaper, I used the expression ‘other men’s flowers’. I cannot now remember in what context but I have not forgotten the sub-editor changing the phrase to ‘other people’s flowers’. I had fool­ishly imagined that, even if my readers did not know Montaigne – ‘I have gathered a posie of other men’s flowers and nothing but the thread that binds them is my own’ – they would at least recognize the play on the title of one of the great poetry anthologies of the twentieth century. Some hope. 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.Music matters, too. The effects of the tricolon, as of any number of other figures, are in some ways metrical. Think of how clusters of stressed syllables can sound resolute and determined. “Yes we can!” 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. 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: So Wavell grew to be a romantic warrior, ruler of India, humorously pulling rank in the depths of war: “My Aides-de-Camp have to listen politely when I quote verse to them – that is a privilege of a Commander-in-Chief”. What did he quote? He was a man of his time though often preferring earlier works: the favourites were Browning, Kipling, Chesterton, Masefield, Keats, Shelley, Macaulay, Scott, but others feature also, including verses by persons unknown.

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.It does help to keep in mind that, as Aristotle wrote, you have three forms of power over the reader: ethos, pathos and logos. That is, roughly: selling yourself, swaying the emotions and Jeremy Cooper, no FuN without U: the art of Factual Nonsense, London 2000, pp.89, 114-21 and 221, reproduced p.118 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 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.)

epistrophe— where the repetition comes at the end rather than the beginning of a sentence. But repetition applies at a subtler level, too. The memorable or resonant phrase, for instance, is oftenDoes this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you. A competent reader often discovers in other men’s writings other perfections than the author himself either intended or perceived, a richer sense and more quaint expression. Portrait of Michel de Montaigne by Salvador Dalí, 1947