Art & Creativity Quote by Robert Morgan

Morgan’s line smuggles a soldier’s way of seeing into a poet’s manifesto: the battlefield teaches you that distance is never just geography. The “far and near” aren’t opposites so much as a switch you learn to flip. One moment, a speck on the horizon decides your fate; the next, a button, a letter, a sound in the dark becomes the whole world. Calling that alchemy is both accurate and sly. Alchemy wasn’t merely mystic glitter; it was an attempt to turn perception into power, to change the value of matter by changing the frame around it. Poetry, he argues, does the same.

The key verb is “distort,” a word that admits manipulation without apology. Morgan isn’t praising poetry for clarifying reality; he’s praising it for warping scale on purpose, for making the mind re-measure what it thought it understood. That’s a quietly radical claim coming from a soldier, a profession built on precision, proportion, and the disciplined suppression of ambiguity. His “delight” signals something like permission: after a life where misjudging size can be fatal, poetry offers a controlled space where exaggeration becomes insight rather than error.

The subtext is also ethical. Seeing “something that’s tiny as though it were vast” is how private experience fights for significance against the official story. It’s how the overlooked detail - a civilian’s face, a mundane object, a small fear - becomes a counterweight to grand narratives of heroism or strategy. Morgan’s alchemy isn’t escapism; it’s a recalibration of what deserves to matter.