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Walt Whitman's To The Sayers Of Words

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In his poem, “To the Sayers of Words,” Walt Whitman recognizes the problems associated with language and its inability to fully convey meaning. As we have discussed in class, Whitman seeks to discover a natural, organic language, which can embody the living force of things on earth. “To the Sayers of Words” is Whitman’s renunciation of “audible words,” as he acknowledges his “tongue is ineffectual on its pivots” and that “the best of earth cannot be told anyhow.” Because we use to mediate or signify things, there is an implied distance between the object and our languages. In this poem, Whitman seeks a merger of “the presentation of the unspoken meanings of the earth,” or to bridge the gap of distance by making “dictionaries of the words that
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