Duty Quote by W. H. Auden

language can't be appropriated by one person, one poet. The words belong to all of us.

— Erica Jong

The poet, by composing poems, uses a language that is neither dead nor living, that few people speak, and few people understand We are…

— Jean Cocteau

“Poetry was a way to combat the staid and formulaic language of politicians that opposed the flexible and dynamic language of poets and writers.”

— Azar Nafisi

I'm fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.

— Wislawa Szymborska

Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words.

— Helen Dunmore

Every poet depends upon generations who wrote in his native tongue; he inherits styles and forms elaborated by those who lived before him. At…

— Czeslaw Milosz

If a poet would work politically, he must give himself up to a party; and so soon as he does that, he is lost…

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult...The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in…

— T. S. Eliot

This capacity for oversignifying, for reading in, is precisely what poets tap into, both in their own practice and in the poem the give…

— Don Paterson

Poets are seen as the caretakers of language, so working with words no matter what the form is what we do.

— Yusef Komunyakaa

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the "N th" power.

— Paul Engle

The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic.

— William Carlos Williams