Quotes from Robert Morgan

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

In the later books I am much more at home in the use of language to describe things. I had never thought of that until a critic pointed that out.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

The best way to develop an abiding awareness of God's presence is to speak to Him often in prayer.

there are no cookie cutters in heaven.

when the punishment was sufficient. Even as a boy Boone showed the stoicism

Visualizing God's presence not only bestows comfort, but it restrains sinful tendencies.

The reality of God's presence both comforts our hearts and restrains our behavior.