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. But what makes Montaigne’s meditation so incisive — and such an urgently necessary fine-tuning of how we think of “curation” today — is precisely the emphasis on the thread. This assemblage of existing ideas, he argues, is nothing without the critical thinking of the assembler — the essential faculty examining those ideas to sieve the meaningful from the meaningless, assimilating them into one’s existing system of knowledge, and metabolizing them to nurture a richer understanding of the world. Montaigne writes:

So where are we now, we proud, sophisticated westerners, in these so-called progressive, industrially successful, commercially and scientifically advanced times, having achieved so much? A reminder from Other Men’s Flowers: 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,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: 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 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, 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:

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!” Other Men's Flowers is a portfolio of text-based prints by fifteen London artists curated by Joshua Compston (1970-96). It was printed by Thomas Shaw and Simon Redington and published by Charles Booth-Clibborn under his imprint, The Paragon Press. Compston took the title, Other Men's Flowers, from an anthology of wartime poetry compiled by Field-Marshal Viscount Wavell (1883-1950) of the same title (published 1944). Wavell had derived the phrase from a well-known quotation attributed to French moralist Montaigne (Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, 1533-92), 'I have gathered a posie of other men's flowers and nothing but the thread which binds them is my own' (quoted in Cooper, p.115). Montaigne's original sentence, published in his Essais ( Essays) in 1580, provided an apparently modest disclaimer, anticipating criticism of the originality of his ideas. For Compston, it provided an apt poetic metaphor for the role of the curator. Other Men's Flowers was launched at a party on 23 June 1994 in a derelict sawmill close to Hoxton Square, East London, a centre for young British artists at that time. Compston wrote in his press release: Prose does not scan like poetry. But it shares its effects. One of the most memorable lines in American history, for instance, is the clause in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”

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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. 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 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. 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. 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?

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? 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. Jeremy Cooper, no FuN without U: the art of Factual Nonsense, London 2000, pp.10, 12, 30, 75-6, 78-9, 89-90, 114-21, 179-80, 184 and 221, reproduced (colour) p.119 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

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 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 often