Robert Morgan Quotes

• 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

  Topics in Family

  Tags in Find, Young

• Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there.

  Robert Morgan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Little, Find, Young

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Yourself, Back, Deep

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

  Robert Morgan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Special, Tension, Develop

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Idea, Story

• 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.

  Robert Morgan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Impossible, Makes, Actually

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Long, Read

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Back, Rock

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in End, Kind, Writing

• 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

  Topics in Art

  Tags in New, Idea

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

  Robert Morgan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Poetry, Modern

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

  Robert Morgan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Fact, Poetry

• 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

  Topics in Decision

  Tags in Made, Write

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Character, Black, Voice

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Best, Short, Times

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

  Robert Morgan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Important, Over, Writing

• Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.

  Robert Morgan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Writing, Dramatic

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

  Robert Morgan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Writer

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

  Robert Morgan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Writing, American, Whether

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

  Robert Morgan

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Important, Read

Robert Morgan (56)

Birth:	1944
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Novelist, Poet, Writer

About

Robert Morgan studied at North Carolina State University as an engineering and mathematics major, transferred to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as an English major, graduating in 1965, and completed an MFA degree at the University of North Carolina Greensboro in 1968. He teaches at Cornell University beginning in 1971.

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Today's Anniversary - 5th April

Births

• 1588 - Thomas Hobbes
• 1938 - Marilyn Ferguson
• 1971 - Krista Allen
• 1865 - Booker T. Washington
• 1923 - Nguyen Van Thieu

Deaths

• 2005 - Saul Bellow
• 1992 - Sam Walton
• 1994 - Kurt Cobain
• 1982 - Abe Fortas
• 2000 - Lee Petty