Top 50 Robert Morgan Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Distance not only gives nostalgia, but perspective, and maybe objectivity.”

— Robert Morgan

2. “What language shall I borrow To thank Thee, dearest Friend, For this, Thy dying sorrow, Thy pity without end? O make me Thine forever, And should I fainting be, Lord, let me never, never Outlive my love for Thee.”

— Robert Morgan

3. “The Black Mountain poet I like most is the early Creeley. Those early poems seem very lyrical and very traditional, with a lot of voice and character.”

— Robert Morgan

4. “Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It’s delightful to distort size, to see something that’s tiny as though it were vast.”

— Robert Morgan

5. “Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.”

— Robert Morgan

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

— Robert Morgan

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

— Robert Morgan

8. “If people associate me with a region, that’s fine with me.”

— Robert Morgan

9. “We have a lot of long narrative poems written in the 20th century, but they’re not very well known, and they’re not read by very many people.”

— Robert Morgan

10. “I encourage students to pursue an idea far enough so they can see what the cliches and stereotypes are. Only then do they begin to hit pay dirt.”

— Robert Morgan

11. “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.”

— Robert Morgan

12. “One of the most powerful devices is to distort time, to go from human time to atomic time, geologic time. Sometimes you can actually accomplish that, with one unexpected word choice.”

— Robert Morgan

13. “The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new.”

— Robert Morgan

14. “I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.”

— Robert Morgan

15. “Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet.”

— Robert Morgan

16. “One of the biggest changes that ever occurred in my life was going from the isolation of working part-time as a house painter in Henderson County, to Cornell, where everybody was a literary person.”

— Robert Morgan

17. “A lot of my students are Asian-American, and it has been thrilling to watch them break through the stereotypes into something alive and surprising.”

— Robert Morgan

18. “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.”

— Robert Morgan

19. “Some people want to call me an Appalachian writer, even though I know some people use regional labels to belittle.”

— Robert Morgan

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

— Robert Morgan

21. “We don’t want to live in the dark moods of imponderable mystery, but neither do we want to miss them altogether. they allow us to emerge from the tender sadness of the manger to sing with the angels in the skies above...”

— Robert Morgan

22. “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.”

— Robert Morgan

23. “There is a smell that lung sickness gives people. It’s the smell of blood and congestion and fever. It’s the smell of blood mixed with air that hangs over a bed and fills a sickroom. It’s the smell of old blood, and blood that is fresh and already old. It’s the smell of a festering wound.”

— Robert Morgan

24. “I write as a way of keeping myself going. You build your life around writing, and it’s what gets you through. So it’s partly just curiosity to see what you can do.”

— Robert Morgan

25. “I seem to keep returning to my father in poems because his personality was so extreme, so driven. He did everything to excess.”

— Robert Morgan

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

— Robert Morgan

27. “The best books of our times have included the three mature volumes of Philip Larkin. They’re very short books of poems, and very carefully arranged.”

— Robert Morgan

28. “Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there.”

— Robert Morgan

29. “I don’t think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.”

— Robert Morgan

30. “I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery.”

— Robert Morgan

31. “I have taught students from the New York City area so long I have a special affinity and rapport with them. It surprises me sometimes that there are students from anywhere else.”

— Robert Morgan

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

— Robert Morgan

33. “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.”

— Robert Morgan

34. “With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed.”

— Robert Morgan

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

— Robert Morgan

36. “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.”

— Robert Morgan

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

— Robert Morgan

38. “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.”

— Robert Morgan

39. “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.”

— Robert Morgan

40. “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.”

— Robert Morgan

41. “Neither of my parents has been very sensitive about my writing.”

— Robert Morgan

42. “In the late 60s and early 70s, I did get interested in voices, and in narration and embodying the voice, making the poem sound like a real person talking.”

— Robert Morgan

43. “In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible.”

— Robert Morgan

44. “I don’t think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.”

— Robert Morgan

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

— Robert Morgan

46. “Young writers only take off when they find their subjects. Since almost everyone has a family and stories about family, that is often a place to start.”

— Robert Morgan

47. “I tell students they will know they are getting somewhere when a scene is so painful they can just barely bring themselves to write about it. A writer has to draw blood.”

— Robert Morgan

48. “When you have an idea for a story, you want those characters to reach as many people as you can. I think you normally think of prose as a way of doing that. It fits our time, the culture.”

— Robert Morgan

49. “The good Lord made the world so we could earn our joy, Ma said. But it’s no guarantee we’ll ever be happy.”

— Robert Morgan

50. “When things are going badly, when you feel trapped between sword and sea, when you’re under assault, acknowledge the devil – but keep your eyes on Christ. He will see you through. He will make a way.”

— Robert Morgan