The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his…

The job of the poet is to render the world-to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about…

— Mark Van Doren

Every poem, formal or free, has an ideal shape, and the job of the poet is to find it.

— Peter Meinke

“It takes a thorough knowledge of the English language to effectively abuse it.”

— Charlene Vermeulen

“To bring relevance to people, you have to be able to speak their language effectively”

— Sunday Adelaja

It is not just shameful for a contemporary American poet to use rhymes, it is unthinkable. It seems banal to him; he fears banality…

— Joseph Brodsky

“A poet is someone who can use a single image to send a universal message.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

A really good stand-up comic is a poet; it's about the use of language. It can be really poetic. And I like politically conscious…

— Sherman Alexie

The job of the poet (a job which can't be learned) consists of placing those objects of the visible world which have become invisible…

— Jean Cocteau

“The job of the poet—which is somewhat quixotic or Sisyphean—is to express things that one may have sensed or felt but never put into…

— Paul S. Atkins

I never meant to be a full-time poet: I started out as a gardener, an ideal job for a poet because your head is…

— Alice Oswald

“My job as a poet, is not to succumb to despair but to find in words, an antidote for the emptiness of existence.”

— Michelle Geaney

“Without pain, poetry is not possible.”

— seerat

Some minds corrode and grow inactive under the loss of personal liberty; others grow morbid and irritable; but it is the nature of the…

— Washington Irving

A poet is wounded into speech, and he examines these wounds, meticulously, to discover how to heal them. The bad poet harangues at the…

— Samuel R. Delany

I fell in love with social work, and that was my undoing as a poet.

— Carl Rakosi