Education Quote by Robert Morgan

There is a small, wicked honesty in admitting you didn’t learn poetry so much as you learned the social choreography around it. Morgan’s line turns “talking about poetry” into a role - a costume you can put on - and that’s the joke with teeth: in many settings, fluency isn’t measured by feeling but by performance. The verb “impersonate” quietly indicts the culture that rewards the correct tone, the right allusions, the safe reverence. It also indicts the speaker, who knows he’s gaming the system.

Blaming teaching is the sharper twist. Teaching, in its best form, is supposed to break down pretense; Morgan suggests it can manufacture it. The classroom can become a factory for plausible-seeming authority: you learn how to sound like someone who has a relationship to art, even if the relationship is borrowed. That’s not just cynicism about educators; it’s a comment on how institutions turn poetry into a subject to be managed, discussed, graded, and domesticated.

The authorial context matters. A soldier admitting to “impersonation” reads like a veteran’s pragmatic intelligence applied to culture: assess the room, adopt the required posture, survive. It hints at how class, war, and professional identity can make “poetry talk” feel like a foreign dialect. Underneath the dry humor sits a question that stings: how much of our cultural literacy is genuine encounter, and how much is learned mimicry designed to pass inspection?