Robert Morgan Quotes

Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.

The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.

The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times.

A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.

The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.

Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.

I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.

Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.

It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.

I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.

I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.

If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.

The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.

Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.

I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry.

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

Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.

Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back.

What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We recognize it when we hear it, when we see it, but we can't define it.

One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. You can go from talking about the way a minute passes to the way a century passes, or a lifetime.