No Limits: A Cliché

After a class dedicated to George Orwell and his beliefs on language, I feel that I should analyze the way Whitman’s talks. It was clear to me that the decay in language also led to the decay in society. They are connected and dependent upon each other. Orwell makes more emphasis on the way we are currently using language. Each time we try to use a French word or Greek word they decay speeds up. It can be considered sad or part of the normal change, but I personally think it is part of the change that must occur. Whitman, as a previous author, could have taught Orwell, and Orwell went ahead expressing that what Whitman wrote was great and how we must continue it. An author today will say that what Orwell wrote was great and will write about how to continue it. The future author will write about the present author, and so on. This process will continue to repeat itself, leading to a change, which does not have to be stopped. This change is what has kept the language alive and will continue to do so.

I now decided to take a passage from one of the poems: “I believe in those wing’d purposes, /And acknowledge red, yellow, white, playing within me, /And consider green and violet, and the tufted crown, intentional;/ And do not call the tortoise unworthy because she is not something else; /And the jay in the woods never studied the gamut, yet trills pretty well to me; /And the look of the bay mare shames silliness out of me” (13). Orwell mentioned that a good author would not have any extra words. When reading this poem it is hard for me to believe that not one word is superfluous. Reading it several times, the only thing that could be eliminated are some of the colors. This is merely a speculation, since in my lack of knowledge, I might not appreciate every word and therefore believe it can be eliminated. What this has taught me is that there are no limits to the learning and analysis that can be done. Nothing is extra until you can prove it.