If you want to write invective and have found a subject who thoroughly deserves it, first, get mad; while furious, boil up the ideas and the crushing descriptions and the lava-flow of invective. Then calm down. Cool off. Reduce them to some form which will overwhelm your opponent: either a single phrase, or a double blast of heat, or an overpowering flow of rhetoric which will shrivel him to a cinder.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Tuesday, August 06, 2024
Recipe for Invective
Gilbert Highet (1906-1978), A Clerk of Oxenford (1954; rpt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 191-192: