When I first heard the term “wax poetic,” I was eighteen years old and sitting at a long wooden table at an upstate New York cousin’s wedding. I was watching a great-uncle get up with a folded piece of paper and a glass of red wine. For almost twelve minutes, he talked about the bride’s grandmother, the scent of her kitchen, the curtains in her parlor, and one afternoon in 1962 when she showed him how to fold napkins. With a whisper that sounded almost affectionate, my aunt leaned over and said, “He’s waxing poetic again.” Her voice carried a slight sigh in addition to a smile. That’s what makes this phrase peculiar. It conveys both affection and impatience.
To put it simply, waxing poetic is speaking in a way that becomes more flowery, enthusiastic, and full of complex vocabulary than the situation actually calls for. This type of speech tends to stray when it ought to land. When you hear it deployed, you get the impression that the speaker has become disoriented. And the listener is pointing that out, whether gently or not.
The majority of English speakers are unaware that the verb itself is older. “Wax,” in this context, has nothing to do with polish, candles, or the little jars found in beauty parlors. It simply means to develop. King Alfred used the word in his translation of Pope Gregory’s Pastoral Care in the ninth century, and it can still be found in Old English manuscripts as weaxan. For centuries, “wax” and its opposite, “wane,” which means to shrink or decrease, were the standard verbs for growth. Both terms are no longer commonly used in everyday English; they are only found in references to the moon and in a few idioms, such as “wax poetic,” “wax lyrical,” and the less common “wax eloquent.”
The rhythm of the phrase may have contributed to its popularity. The way the soft w slides into the harder p is appealing. It stuck, for whatever reason. Sir Henry Morton Stanley’s 1872 account is the earliest known instance of “wax poetic” in print. He states in How I Found Livingstone, “One could almost wax poetic, but we will keep such ambitious ideas for a future day.” As it happens, Stanley was a passionate waxer of all kinds. Sometimes in the same chapter, he also expressed anger, bravery, and indignation. “Wax eloquent” first appeared in Washington Irving’s Bracebridge Hall from 1824, where it was used to describe a country squire becoming expansive about England’s smoking industrial towns. The man obviously liked the verb. Ironically, Irving was experiencing writer’s block at the time, grieving a loss in his family, and was unable to complete his sentences, much less wax anything.
English speakers seem to take pleasure in the phrase’s subtle criticism. Seldom do people mean well when they say you’re waxing poetic. It typically indicates that your toast at dinner has strayed three minutes past its proper conclusion or that you have spoken too long during a board meeting. As you observe how this phrase functions in actual conversations, you begin to realize that it is nearly always a gentle warning. A soft touch on the shoulder. Quit. Take a seat. The audience has moved on.
However, it can be a compliment when used in the proper context. When someone waxes poetic about jazz, their grandmother’s garden, or a specific stretch of coastline, it’s a sign that they love it so much that they lose themselves in it. Maybe that’s why the phrase hasn’t died. It depicts a very human conflict between excess and expression, between expressing one’s true feelings and talking too much about them. In Horse Feathers in 1932, Groucho Marx, always aware of the ridiculousness of formal speech, misinterpreted “waxing wroth” as a request to polish someone named Roth. The joke is still funny. It is invited by the phrase.
Nearly 200 years later, “wax poetic” is still used in quiet kitchen-table corrections, essays, novels, and sports columns. With so little explanation, it’s difficult to ignore how few archaic verbs have endured this long. The majority of its users are unaware that they are borrowing from King Alfred. They simply understand what it means when an uncle arrives at a wedding carrying a glass of wine and a folded piece of paper.
