Poems can be used to express the writer's response to the issues emerging around his social life. This paper aims at finding out how the language is used in the poems of Lanang Setiawan in Javanese of Tegal. The source of the data is three collections of his poems entitled Tegal Sumbu Pendek, Tegal Melawan and Ndoro Binyak. The colleted data are in the forms of utterances analyzed based on speech act theory proposed by some experts. The finding shows that directive speech acts in the poems are

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... ealized both directly and indirectly. The direct directive speech acts are expressed in the forms of imperative sentences, while the indirect directive spech acts are realized in the form of declarative sentences with the expression of need, desire, and expectation. The factors influencing the directness of the directive speech acts are the distance and power between the speakers and the hearers.