Top 56 Quotes by Robert Morgan

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Neither of my parents has been very sensitive about my writing.

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

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.

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.

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.