Word Hoard: The Rhetoric of Poetry (Student Text)

$49.00

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.

Intended for upper high school, as well as early college.

Pre-order: Shipping July 2026.

Available for pre-order

SKU: WH-001 Categories: ,

Product Description

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).

Contents

Introductionix
Thanksxiii
Unit I: Why Study Poetry?1
Lesson 1: What is Poetry?3
Lesson 2: What is Bad Poetry?9
Lesson 3: Your Word Hoard17
Unit II: Understanding the Poetic Elements25
Lesson 4: Introduction to the Poetic Elements27
Lesson 5: How Poetic Elements Elevate Expression35
Unit III: Rhythm & Meter41
Lesson 6: Exploring Rhythms in Poetry43
Lesson 7: Meter—The Measure of Poetry49
Lesson 8: A Word from Dr. Johnson53
Lesson 9: Rhyme59
Lesson 10: Natural Rhythm65
Lesson 11: Real Meter75
Unit IV: Alliteration & Assonance83
Lesson 12: Old English Poetry85
Lesson 13: Middle English Poetry93
Lesson 14: Alliteration & Assonance Now99
Unit V: Poetic Forms105
Lesson 15: Free Verse107
Lesson 16: Blank Verse & Terza Rima113
Lesson 17: Poetic Aphorisms, Epigrams & Cinquains121
Lesson 18: Sonnets129
Lesson 19: Villanelle139
Lesson 20a: Shaped Poetry147
Lesson 20b: Jack of All Forms, Master of New Ones153
Unit VI: Some Tropes, Some Styles, Some Memeing, No Synecdoche157
Lesson 21: Figures of Speech159
Lesson 22a: Imagery165
Lesson 22b: Simile & Metaphor173
Lesson 23: Repetition & Parallels179
Lesson 24: Onomatopoeia193
Unit VII: Composing199
Lesson 25: What Do I Write?201
Lesson 26: Death207
Lesson 27: Delight211
Lesson 28: Food215
Lesson 29: Nature219
Lesson 30: Sports221
Lesson 31: Transience227
Unit VIII: Performance231
Lesson 32: Reading Reified233

Title: Word Hoard: The Rhetoric of Poetry
Author: Joffre Swait
Publisher: Roman Roads Press, 2026.
Dimensions and Format: 8.5 x 11, consumable perfect bound text
Pages: 262
ISBN: 978-1-963505-31-3

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