Farnsworth's Classical English Metaphor

Make your writing and speech shine like the sun! Here’s the most entertaining and instructive book about both enlivening and clarifying communication with the art of comparison. “Ward Farnsworth is a witty commentator…It’s a book to dip in and savor.”—The Boston Globe.

The author of Farnsworth’s Classical English Style and Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric now provides a wide-ranging, practical, tour of metaphors, arranged by theme. Chapters include Sources & Uses of Comparisons, The Use of Nature to Describe Abstractions, Extreme People & States, Circumstances, Personification, and The Construction of Similes.

Using hundreds of examples, Farnsworth demonstrates all the different stylistic ways that points can be unforgettably made. There are quotations from novelists, poets, playwrights, philosophers, and orators—along with commentary on how and why they work to bring power to words both in person and on paper.


Farnsworth shows how the best writers have put figurative comparisons to distinctive use—for the sake of caricature, to make an abstract idea visible, to make a complicated idea simple. Writers and speakers, this book will make you a star.