"I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry"
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There is a hard-earned skepticism baked into Morgan's claim: poetry, he suggests, isn’t a skill you install like a rifle drill. Coming from a soldier, the line quietly rejects the fantasy that discipline alone can manufacture interior life. You can train posture, timing, and technique; you can’t order someone into the kind of perception that makes language feel inevitable.
The intent is protective as much as it is dismissive. Morgan isn’t attacking workshops so much as drawing a boundary around what instruction can honestly promise. “Encourage” is doing the moral work here: mentorship matters, community matters, permission matters. But “the very essence” remains stubbornly private. That phrasing implies an almost sacred residue - the nerve-center where experience becomes music, where a metaphor lands because the writer has actually lived the pressure behind it. His subtext: if a teacher claims to teach that essence, they’re selling a comforting story, not an art.
Context sharpens the point. A 20th-century soldier would have seen how institutions shape bodies and behavior while failing to shape conscience or meaning. War produces volumes of language - orders, reports, propaganda - that communicate without illumination. Poetry, by contrast, is the opposite of command: it’s attention, vulnerability, and precision without coercion. Morgan’s statement doubles as a warning to young writers: learn craft, yes, but don’t confuse polish with truth. The real work isn’t being “taught” so much as being compelled - by memory, grief, tenderness, rage - to make sentences that can’t be replaced.
The intent is protective as much as it is dismissive. Morgan isn’t attacking workshops so much as drawing a boundary around what instruction can honestly promise. “Encourage” is doing the moral work here: mentorship matters, community matters, permission matters. But “the very essence” remains stubbornly private. That phrasing implies an almost sacred residue - the nerve-center where experience becomes music, where a metaphor lands because the writer has actually lived the pressure behind it. His subtext: if a teacher claims to teach that essence, they’re selling a comforting story, not an art.
Context sharpens the point. A 20th-century soldier would have seen how institutions shape bodies and behavior while failing to shape conscience or meaning. War produces volumes of language - orders, reports, propaganda - that communicate without illumination. Poetry, by contrast, is the opposite of command: it’s attention, vulnerability, and precision without coercion. Morgan’s statement doubles as a warning to young writers: learn craft, yes, but don’t confuse polish with truth. The real work isn’t being “taught” so much as being compelled - by memory, grief, tenderness, rage - to make sentences that can’t be replaced.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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