Newman’s contrast between words and things echoes—though in opposite spirit—the Coleridgean notion of ‘destroy[ing] the old antithesis of Words and Things’, ‘elevating, as it were, words into Things, and living Things too’. Far from things, living or not, words are modes of engaging with the world; they create senses of reality; they are neither aesthetic symbols nor signs corresponding to something whose existence in its exactitude is already known. Words are not referential, though they can be used to refer and though they evidently apply to the world, as A. D. Nuttall argued in his advocacy of ‘Transparent’ criticism against formalism. Yet ‘transparent’ criticism, as Anne Barton has stressed, risks neglecting words altogether. Words relate to things, a term more illuminating than refer, partly because the latter elides so easily with the ‘merely referential’ thesis; but principally because the former indicates that a mode of relation is also at stake between word and whatever it speaks of. Words aren’t clothing, cases, or symbols; they enable a felt mode of experiencing, through tone, atmosphere, or mood; and they always entail—accidentally or deliberately, or a little of both—an aspect of relationship: a mode of relating to whatever they invoke. Thinking about words as relating ensures that the fact that attention must never stray from the way words are used isn’t misconstrued as looking at words alone, as end-points (the more extreme formalist view Nuttall’s book targets). Attention to words means attention to modes of thinking, feeling, and imagining, that is to say, to the attitudinal realm; and it also means attention to how words connect with what they evoke, and how we speak of this connection. Embodying, enacting, enabling? Representing, expressing, demonstrating? Asserting, presenting, suggesting? Exploring, discovering, attending? It’s true that our own attitude towards words is determining; we have agency concerning how our words fall, how they make themselves felt to readers or listeners. But words, even if we use them, Henry-style, to manipulate, to close down options and narrow the exploratory range of conversations, are nevertheless always generative of a relationship. They always create atmosphere and reveal attitude, however much these might not be those we would have chosen. An alert listener or reader will always be able to hear this mode of relating, the attitudinal realm, even while the user of the words, choosing to use them uncreatively, to deploy them as modes of force, is likely to deceive themselves that the aspect of relationship, betraying them in ways they aren’t aware of, is not present.