Politics & Power Quote by Robert Morgan

Morgan’s jab lands because it’s not a culture-war rant about “kids these days.” It’s a soldier’s sideways verdict on institutionalized art: the idea that you can systematize imagination, run it through a program, and expect the result to improve. The first sentence is blunt to the point of provocation. “Any better” isn’t a nuanced metric; it’s a refusal to grant incremental progress, a way of puncturing the self-congratulating narrative that more MFA programs must mean better poems.

The subtext is less about poems than about the ecosystem that produces them. In the postwar decades, American poetry became increasingly professionalized: workshops, journals, prizes, a ladder of credentials. Morgan implies that this pipeline may generate more poets, more product, more polish, but not necessarily more urgency. Coming from someone whose formative context includes real stakes - war, hierarchy, consequence - “better” reads as shorthand for necessity, risk, and memorability, not technique.

Then he swerves: fiction, oddly, has benefited. That concession is the quote’s pressure point. He’s admitting surprise, which makes the skepticism feel earned rather than reflexive. It suggests a practical distinction: fiction can be taught as craft - scene, structure, revision - without killing its life, while poetry’s force often depends on voice, compression, and weirdness that workshops tend to sand down into competence.

Contextually, it’s also a snapshot of late-20th-century American letters, when the workshop became the default gatekeeper. Morgan isn’t nostalgic for a lost golden age so much as suspicious of a system that rewards replicable style over singular need.