Robert Morgan Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does.

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.