EN
The article is a review of the issues concerning the views of Cyprian Norwid on the topic of the essence of language, as well as an attempt to confront them with the poet’s reflection on contemporary Polish language. The author begins his reflections by pre-senting the sketched general principles of his theory of words and language, and then compares them contextually with the statements of the poet on the nineteenth-century Polish language. The contexts understood as a set of references needed to understand Norwid’s speech about Polish language mainly concern those elements of its design lan-guage, as dual essence words (Spirit – Letter), the question of the relationship between word and deed, word and thought, clarity of language and individual appropriation and collective responsibility for the word.