The Radix is an unusual work of scholarship poised on the precarious threshold between poetry and philosophy. It is a poem, or rather a series of poetic essays, because all the elements of which it consists are poems. The title invokes the metaphorical root of a word, the radix or etym, which at once concentrates and radiates living energies. The overall thesis is that each word is, or contains, its own poem. Language itself, as Emerson once phrased it, is «fossil poetry». Each word is primordial. It is the center and, in a certain sense, the whole of language. And it is the intent of The Radix to bring that primordial Word to life again.