"The written word is everything"
About this Quote
A poet declaring "The written word is everything" sounds like a devotional line, but it also carries a quiet provocation: everything that matters must be made legible, fixed, and shareable, or it might as well not exist. Drinkwater is writing from a moment when print still felt like the main engine of public life. Early 20th-century Britain was a culture of newspapers, pamphlets, scripts, and manifestos; the written sentence wasn’t just art, it was infrastructure. If you wanted to persuade, scandalize, memorialize, or reform, you did it in ink.
The absolutism is the point. "Everything" is not a careful claim; it’s a poet’s power move. It elevates craft into sovereignty, implying that speech, experience, even emotion only become durable once they pass through the discipline of form. There’s a moral subtext here: writing is accountability. What’s spoken can be denied, revised, blurred by charisma. What’s written stands still long enough to be interrogated.
At the same time, the line betrays anxiety. To insist that the written word is everything is to fear the opposite: that life is slipping into noise, speed, forgetfulness. Drinkwater’s era saw new competitors for attention - cinema, radio, mass spectacle - and modernism’s experiments were challenging old literary authority. The quote reads like a stake in the ground: a defense of literature’s centrality, yes, but also an admission that centrality now has to be argued for.
The absolutism is the point. "Everything" is not a careful claim; it’s a poet’s power move. It elevates craft into sovereignty, implying that speech, experience, even emotion only become durable once they pass through the discipline of form. There’s a moral subtext here: writing is accountability. What’s spoken can be denied, revised, blurred by charisma. What’s written stands still long enough to be interrogated.
At the same time, the line betrays anxiety. To insist that the written word is everything is to fear the opposite: that life is slipping into noise, speed, forgetfulness. Drinkwater’s era saw new competitors for attention - cinema, radio, mass spectacle - and modernism’s experiments were challenging old literary authority. The quote reads like a stake in the ground: a defense of literature’s centrality, yes, but also an admission that centrality now has to be argued for.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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