Politics & Power Quote by Robert Morgan

There is a blunt, almost barracks-like skepticism in Morgan's swipe at the "creative writing industry": it treats art less as a calling than as a supply chain. Coming from a soldier, the phrasing matters. "Industry" is the tell, a word that collapses workshops, MFA programs, grants, residencies, and literary journals into a single machine with inputs, outputs, and professional incentives. The intent isn't to sneer at craft itself; it's to question what happens when poetry becomes a credentialed career track rather than an unruly practice that answers to lived pressure.

The subtext is about conformity disguised as originality. A training system can standardize taste: the workshop voice, the safe epiphany, the polite ironies that signal sophistication without risking embarrassment. When you build a pathway where publication and employment are linked to peer approval, you also build a quiet politics of consensus. The poem starts auditioning for a committee. Morgan's line implies that American poetry, in gaining institutional support, may have traded some of its weirdness, regional grit, and argumentative independence for professional fluency.

Contextually, the 20th century saw the rise of the MFA as a dominant pipeline, reshaping who gets time to write and who gets read. Morgan, with a soldier's sensibility, is suspicious of systems that reward strategic behavior. The jab lands because it's not anti-intellectual; it's anti-bureaucratic. It suggests poetry's health depends less on how many programs exist and more on whether poems still feel like messages smuggled from real life, not products optimized for an industry that needs them to keep coming.