A word after a word after a word is power.

This line is from Margaret Atwood’s poem “Spelling,” first published in her 1970 poetry collection *The Circle Game*. In the poem, Atwood reflects on learning language—spelling, naming, and forming sentences—and links that seemingly ordinary skill to larger questions of agency, gender, and control. Written during a period when Atwood was establishing herself as a major Canadian poet, the poem treats words not as neutral tools but as forces that can shape reality, authorize action, and confer authority. The quoted line appears as a culminating assertion about the cumulative force of language: power accrues through the act of putting words together, one after another.

The quote compresses a theory of language into a simple progression: individual words may seem small, but their accumulation produces “power.” Read literally, it describes how writing and speech build momentum—argument, narrative, testimony—until they can persuade, command, or transform. In Atwood’s recurring thematic terrain, it also hints at the political stakes of language: naming can confer legitimacy, stories can authorize systems, and repeated utterance can normalize or challenge what a society accepts as true. The line therefore celebrates craft (the writer’s patient labor) while warning that power can be generated by any sustained discourse, for good or ill.