Dialect or the speech of the people is capable of expressing whatever the people are.

"I wanted to understand my people. I wanted to understand what it meant to he a Negro. what the qualities of life were. With their imagination, they combine two great loves: the love of words and the love of life. Poetry results."

"[T]he sincere, sensitive artist, willing to go beneath the cliches of popular belief to get at an underlying reality, will be wary of confining a race's entire characters to a half-dozen narrow grooves."

One thing they cannot prohibit --
The strong men . . . coming on
The strong men gittin' stronger.
Strong men. . . .
Stronger. . . .

"I have . . . a deep concern with the development of a literature worthy of our past, and of our destiny; without which literature certainly, we can never come to much. I have a deep concern with the development of an audience worthy of such a literature."