Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Morgan

A soldier admitting he “did not have a very literary background” isn’t self-deprecation so much as a quiet rebuke to the gatekeepers who treat poetry like an inherited accent. Morgan frames his route in through “the sciences and mathematics,” disciplines associated with precision, proof, and hard limits. That pairing matters: it suggests a mind trained to respect structure and to distrust vague sentiment. The subtext is that poetry, for him, isn’t an escape from rigor but another form of it - patterned, economical, attentive to relationships between parts.

Then he adds the pivot: “also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.” Translation is doing double duty here. It’s a practical admission (he likely didn’t read the originals) and a cultural stance: he’s comfortable meeting art through mediation, through versions, through the imperfect but illuminating bridge. For someone defined publicly as a soldier, this is telling. Military life is full of systems, codes, and protocols; translation offers a parallel experience of meaning carried across constraints. Japanese and Chinese poetic traditions, especially in the Western imagination, are associated with compression, image, and restraint - a different masculinity than the booming, rhetorical kind.

Contextually, the early-to-mid 20th century saw English-language poetry increasingly fascinated with haiku, Tang poems, and Zen-flavored minimalism. Morgan’s line places him in that current while keeping the focus on personal formation: poetry as a discipline discovered sideways, not bestowed by education. The intent is to legitimize an outsider’s authority: I came by this honestly, through work, not pedigree.