Politics & Power Quote by Robert Morgan

"Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners"

Robert Morgan, Soldier

About this Quote

There is a quiet provocation tucked into Morgan's compliment: the literary center of gravity, he implies, has slipped away from the presumed capitals and settled in the red-clay periphery. Saying he reads "with most enjoyment" sounds genial, even domestic, but the follow-up claim that "the best poetry" is coming from Southerners turns taste into a verdict. It's not just regional pride; it's a challenge to the mid-century reflex that serious American writing is minted in New York, Boston, or the university circuit.

Coming from a soldier, the statement carries an extra charge of earned authority. Soldiers are trained to measure reality against rhetoric, and Morgan's praise reads like field-report candor: the vivid stuff is happening where language still has to wrestle with history in public. In the South, poetry doesn't get to be only clever; it has to metabolize memory, violence, religion, class, and the afterlife of the Civil War and Jim Crow. That pressure can sharpen craft. The subtext is that Southern writers, boxed in by stereotype, were forced to innovate - to make lyric beauty out of contested ground.

"Several North Carolinians" is also a tell. Morgan is mapping a personal canon through a specific place, suggesting the regional is not quaint but catalytic: communities, small presses, local readings, and shared landscapes producing an aesthetic. The line is less a manifesto than a recalibration: if you want to understand America as it's actually lived, he hints, read the poets who can't pretend the past is over.

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Topic	Poetry
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Robert Morgan

Robert Morgan (July 31, 1918 - May 15, 2004) was a Soldier from USA.

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