Caretakers Quote by Yusef Komunyakaa

The poets are the standard bearers of language. Their work lives or dies word by word. When I write and can hear a clunky…

— Janet Fitch

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

— Lucille Clifton

As a prose writer, I work with language; and those who work with language turn to poetry for renewal.

— Samuel R. Delany

Poetry is a language used in a different way.

— Anonymous

We all write poems; it is simply that the poets are the ones who write in words

— John Fowles

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

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

— William Carlos Williams

The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind…

— Robert Morgan

Poems' deep work is a matter of language, but also a matter of life. One part of that work is to draw into our…

— Jane Hirshfield

Poetry demands a different material than prose. It uses another facet of the same fact … the spontaneous conformation of language as it is heard.

— William Carlos Williams

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

— George Orwell

Poetry doesn't function by saying things straightforwardly because the language is too imprecise, too limited often, to address the underlying subject of most poems.

— Pattiann Rogers