Great is language, wonderful is language,
Illustrious the attribute of speech,
Language-using controls the rest.
Not only man and civilization, but the history of nature in all departments, and of the organic universe, brought up to date—
all are comprehended in words!

What beauty there is in words!
I have found that no word spoken, but is beautiful, in its place.
A word is a poem of poems!
What a lurking curious charm in the sound of some words.

All words are spiritual—nothing is more spiritual than words,
One word can pour such a flood through the soul,
A word, liquid, sane, unruly, musical, self-sufficient,
O a word to clear one’s path ahead endlessly!

I take a good deal of trouble with words. Each word has its own meaning, and does not stand for anything but itself. There are no two words the same any more than there are two persons the same. Everything consists in the use of the right word.

How curious—the immense variety of languages,
Endless unfolding of words of ages,
Language is the fulness, color, form, diversity of the earth, and of men and women, and of all qualities and processes.

Slowly, eternally, inevitably, move the souls of the earth, and names and words are their signs. Every soul has its own individual language, no two have exactly the same language. Every existence has its idiom, everything has an idiom and tongue, often unspoken, or lamely, feebly, haltingly spoken; but a true fit for that man, and perfectly adapted to his use.

The truths I tell to you or any other may not be plain to you, mostly because I fail to translate them fully from my idiom into yours. If I could do so, and do it well, they would be as apparent to you as they are to me; for they are truths.
I illuminate feelings, faults, yearnings, hopes, tidings old, yet ever new and untranslatable—I too am untranslatable.

The idea of a universal language is grand, noble—is in line with all the broad, deep tendencies of the time—is one with the democratic drifts, glories, of our time—the over-flowing, ever-flowing humanities. A universal language has a lot to provide for—must provide for the Asiatic and the African as well as for us—must not cast out any nation, any people, however remote.
Language may some day merge all tongues into one tongue. (The points where they differ are not near as remarkable as where they resemble.) But it will not do so by an edict of scholars or a pronunciamento from the universities.

Language is a thing which takes its own path of growth. Words are not original and arbitrary in themselves. Words are a result—they are the progeny of what has been or is in vogue. Language was systematized and passed on from one generation to another in methods answering to what was needed. 
The science of language has large and close analogies in geological science, with its ceaseless evolution, its fossils, and its numberless submerged layers and hidden strata, the infinite go-before of the present. Or, perhaps language is more like some vast living body, or perennial body of bodies.

Get in the habit of tracing words to their root-meanings. Every sentence we articulate with our voices, and every type-line worked off from the printing presses, here, today, retains subtle, living, entirely unbroken chains of succession back through the Middle Ages, the Roman sway, Greece, Judah, India, Egypt, with arriere-threads to all prehistory, to the vanished peoples, retrospects of the past, to a hundred unknown nations.

But I think I am done with many of the words of the past hundred centuries—sounded and resounded words, chattering words, echoes, dead words. I am mad that their poems, bibles, words, still rule and represent the earth, and are not yet superseded. I say we have here, now, a greater age to celebrate, greater ideas to embody, than anything even in Greece or Rome.
Yet why do I say so? I must not, will not, be impatient. America owes immeasurable respect and love to the past, and to many ancestries, for many inheritances.

Of all that America has received from the past, from the mothers and fathers of laws, arts, letters, etc., by far the greatest inheritance is the English language—so long in growing—so fitted.
The English language befriends the grand American expression—it is brawny enough and limber and full enough. It is not a polished fossil language, but the true broad fluid language of democracy.  It is the dialect of common sense. It is the speech of the proud and melancholy races and of all who aspire. It is the chosen tongue to express growth, faith, self-esteem, freedom, justice, equality, friendliness, amplitude, prudence, decision, and courage.

The English tongue is full of strong words, native or adopted, to express the blood-born passion of the race for rudeness and resistance: robust, brawny, acrid, harsh, pluck, grit, effrontery, stern, resistance, bracing, rude, rugged, arrogant, haughty. These words are alive and sinewy—they walk, look, step, with an air of command. This is the tongue that spurns laws, as the greatest tongue must.

Then we have upon it great improvements to make—very great ones—develop language anew, make it not literal and of the elder modes, but elliptical and idiomatic.
The immense diversity of race, temperament, character—the copious streams of humanity constantly flowing hither—must reappear in free, rich growth of speech—a language fanned by the breath of nature, which leaps overhead, cares mostly for impetus and effects, and for what it plants and invigorates to grow, and seldomer tells a thing than suggests or necessitates it. It is the medium that shall well nigh express the inexpressible.

The propensity to approach a meaning not directly and squarely, but by circuitous styles of expression, seems indeed a born quality of the common people everywhere.

All others have adhered to the principle, and shown it, that the poet and savan form classes by themselves, above the people, and more refined than the people. I show that they are just as great when of the people, partaking of the common idioms, manners, and what is vulgar.
I love to go away from books, and walk amidst the strong coarse talk of men. The language of the strong working people is better than the general lingo that is used in our drawing and lecture rooms. It is really more expressive.

Language is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground. Its final decisions are made by the masses, people nearest the concrete, having most to do with actual land and sea. They give muscle and bone to every word they speak.

The words continually used among the people are, in numberless cases, not the words used in writing, or recorded in the dictionaries by authority; there are just as many words in daily use, not inscribed in the dictionary, and seldom or never in any print.
The real dictionary will give all words that exist in use, the bad words as well as any. Many of these bad words are fine. The appetite of the people, in popular speeches and writings, for unhemmed latitude, coarseness, live epithets, expletives—this I understand because I have the taste myself as large as anyone. I like limber, lasting, fierce words, common idioms and phrases, Yankeeisms and vulgarisms.

I like any word which sharply defines its object. I prefer the ugly to the beautiful words if the ugly word says more; ugly words you’ll often find drive more immediately to their purpose. Bad presidents, bad judges, bad editors, the long ranks of political suckers, monopolists, cry down the use of strong, cutting, beautiful, rude words. I have pleasure in the use, on fit occasions, of words of opprobrium, resistance—traitor, coward, liar, shyster, skulk, doughface, trickster, mean cuss, backslider, thief, impotent, lickspittle.

It is certain that many of the oldest and solidest words we use, were originally generated from the daring and license of slang. Slang, profoundly consider’d, is the lawless germinal element, below all words and sentences, and behind all poetry—the wholesome fermentation or eructation of those processes eternally active in language, by which froth and specks are thrown up, mostly to pass away; though occasionally to settle and permanently crystallize.
Many of the slang words are powerful words, strong words solid as logs. Slang proves a certain perennial rankness and protestantism in speech, an attempt of common humanity to escape from bald literalism and express itself illimitably, which in highest walks produces poets and poems.

The black dialect furnishes hundreds of outré words, many of them adopted into the common speech of the masses of the people. The black dialect has hints of the future theory of the modification of all the words of the English language. Then we should have two sets of words, male and female as they should be, in these states, both equally understood by the people.

The spelling of words is subordinate. For many hundred years there was nothing like settled spelling.

The forms of grammar are never persistently obeyed, and cannot be. A sort of extreme grammaticism—the shudder for a word misspelled, misused—offends me. When it is made too prominent—when it is indeed insisted upon, when it is too much poked in one’s face—I turn my back on it.
Everybody here says “punkin”—even some who think themselves great “punkins” too! I know it is not right, but sometimes a fellow is glad not to be right. He gets into the way of the locality, the people, allows their habits, phrases—and better to do so, too! Perfect English and perfect sense don’t always go together! Not only the dictionary of the English language, but the grammar of it, has yet to be written.

What is the curious rapport of names? It is a profound, vexatious, never-explicable matter—this of names. I have been exercised deeply about it my whole life.
I have been informed that there are people who say it is not important about names—one word is as good as another if the designation be understood. I say that nothing is more important than names. Names are magic. A delicate subtle something there is in the right name—an undemonstrable nourishment—that exhilarates the soul.

My arous’d child’s heart, pleas’d with the sound of my own name, repeating it over and over,
I stand apart to hear—it never tires me.
To you your name also;
Did you think there was nothing but two or three pronunciations in the sound of your name?

Names are a test of the aesthetic and of spirituality. Names are the turning point of who shall be master. No country can have its own poems without it have its own names—to make them show who they are, what land they were born in, what government, what genius, mark, blood, times, have coined them with strong-cut coinage.
Thus does all human interest hang around names. All men experience it, but no man ciphers it out. The full history of names would be the total of human, and all other, history.

I was asking for something savage and luxuriant, and behold, here are the aboriginal names. All aboriginal names sound good. Among the aborigines the following names: 
Horn-point; Round-wind; Stand-and-look-out; The-cloud-that-goes-aside; Iron-flash; Two-feathers-of-honor; Bushy-tail; Thunder-face; Go-on-the-burning-sod; Keep-the-fire; Spiritual-woman; Second-daughter-of-the-house; Blue-bird.

The red aborigines leaving natural breaths, sounds of rain and winds, calls as of birds and animals in the woods, syllabled to us for names, charging the water and the land with names:
Okonee, Koosa, Ottawa, Monongahela, Sauk, Natchez, Chattahoochee, Kaqueta, Oronoco, Wabash,  Miami, Saginaw, Chippewa, Oshkosh, Walla-Walla.
The great Indian names lost, like so many opportunities!

Why should we give up the native for borrowed names? We secured no benefit by a desertion of Indian names. The Indian words are often perfect. They are honest words—they give the true length, breadth, depth. They all fit. Ohio, Connecticut, Ottawa all fit. Mississippi—the word winds with chutes—it rolls a stream three thousand miles long. Monongahela—it rolls with venison richness upon the palate. 

The great writers must have digested all these things—
Passed lexicons, etymologies, orthographies through them and extracted the nutriment—
And the dictionaries of words that print cannot touch.

Were you thinking that those were the words,
Those upright lines? those curves, angles, dots?
No, those are not the words;
Were you thinking that those were the words, those delicious sounds out of your friends’ mouths?
No, the real words are more delicious than they.

The substantial words are in the ground and sea,
They are in the air, they are in you,
A healthy presence, a friendly or commanding gesture, are words, sayings, meanings,
The charms that go with the mere looks of some men and women, are sayings and meanings also.

Earth, suns, moons, the rude visage of animals and trees—all these are words,
Air, soil, water, fire—those are words.
I myself am a word with them—
But my name is nothing to them,
Though it were told in the three thousand languages,
What would air, soil, water, fire, know of my name?

Beauty, reality, manhood, time, life—the realities of such as these are the earth’s words,
I say the great grammar and the great dictionary of the future must embody the earth,
The earth, I see, writes with prodigal clear hands and certain to be understood in time,
Underneath the ostensible sounds—the august chorus of heroes, the wail of slaves,
Persuasions of lovers, curses, gasps of the dying, laughter of young people, accents of bargainers—
Underneath these possessing words that never fail;
To her children the words of the eloquent dumb great mother never fail;
The true words do not fail, for motion does not fail and reflection does not fail.

All merges toward the presentation of the unspoken meanings of the earth,
They are calm, subtle, untransmissible by print,
They are imbued through all things conveying themselves willingly.

The workmanship of souls is by the inaudible words of the earth,
With her ample back towards every beholder,
Conveying a sentiment and invitation:
I utter and utter, I speak not, yet if you hear me not of what avail am I to you?
To bear, to better, lacking these of what avail am I?

Say on, sayers of words! Work on, age after age!
Delve! mould! pile the words of the earth!
Work on! It is materials you bring, not breaths,
When the materials are all prepared and ready, the architects shall appear,
I swear to you the architects shall appear without fail.

The workmen, possessed with an indescribable faith, go on age after age in their work—
Here comes one among the well-beloved stonecutters and plans with decision and science,
And sees the solid and beautiful forms of the future where there are now no solid forms—
And at last come architects and use, each in its place, the stones they had cut.

NEXT:  POETRY AND THE POET

The texts in this anthology should NOT be cited as direct quotations from Whitman. If you want to quote from this site for something you are writing or posting, please read this first (click here).