Motherhood Quote by Johann G. Hamann

Hamann’s line is a grenade lobbed into the tidy Enlightenment parlor. Calling poetry “the mother-tongue of the human race” isn’t a sentimental tribute to verse; it’s a direct challenge to the era’s confidence that reason, system, and clean prose can explain what humans are. “Mother-tongue” signals what comes first: before grammar drills, before philosophy, before the bureaucratic language of the state, there is the messy, metaphor-laced way people actually make sense of the world. Hamann is arguing that imagination isn’t decoration on top of thought. It’s the medium thought happens in.

The intent is polemical. Hamann, a contrarian critic of rationalist grand designs, insists that language is not a neutral pipeline for ideas; it’s a living, historically saturated thing. Poetry becomes shorthand for embodied speech: image, rhythm, ambiguity, all the elements Enlightenment discourse tried to discipline. If reason wants to be sovereign, Hamann reminds it that it was raised by a mother it can’t disown.

The subtext carries a theological and cultural edge. “Mother” implies origin, intimacy, dependence - and also authority that precedes the modern “autonomous” self. In an age trying to build knowledge on universal foundations, Hamann drags us back to the local and the particular: a people’s idioms, myths, scripture, folktales, the untranslatable residues that refuse to be reduced to concepts. It works because it’s not merely praising poetry; it’s exposing the Enlightenment’s blind spot: the belief that humans can think without metaphor, and speak without inheritance.