Word Hoard: The Rhetoric of Poetry (Student Text)

A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO NOBILITY

This book is a practical guide to nobility through understanding and wielding the English language in its most elevated forms. It is an exercise book on truth, beauty, and goodness as spoken.

This book will help grow your skill and confidence in poetry, your aesthetic sensibility, and your rhetorical performance. As you will soon learn, our words are our greatest treasures, our finest tools, and our most dangerous weapons. As speakers of the good word, the good-spell, the gospel, we will not allow the destroyers and robots to hold the field.

As English speakers, we have an incredible poetic heritage. We come from a people who mightily and manfully valued verbs and verse. The speakers of Old English loved their swordplay and their poems and their poems about swordplay.

In this book, you will have the opportunity to read three different poems about snipers, and study each to learn its distinct virtues. You will learn about the technical aspects of poetry as a carpenter learns how to handle his tools: poetry was made for man, not man for poetry. There is no other curriculum on the market that will teach you how to love poetry and word-wielding as Faramir loved the deeds of war: “I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”

This curriculum is designed to teach you to love poetry not for its own sake but for the sake of your Lord God and His people.

When you have completed Word Hoard, you will have comprehensively studied the formal elements of poetry, and read illustrative examples galore to help you understand the effect of each technique. You will have developed an understanding of trope and structure that will equip you not only to appreciate and compose poetry but to speak well in every circumstance.

Word Hoard is constructed to be the capstone to your rhetorical training (high school), or as a portal to your adult life as a word-wielder (early college).

Pre-order: Coming Summer 2026