"I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction"
About this Quote
A soldier imagining his old age as a poet is less a genre preference than a quiet bid for a different kind of authority. Robert Morgan frames the future in probabilities, not promises: "more likely" is the language of someone trained to plan around uncertainty, to respect forces that make a mockery of intention. That caution gives the line its emotional charge. He is not declaring an artistic destiny; he is admitting a shift in what he expects to be able to carry.
The subtext is about stamina and scale. Fiction asks for long, sustained immersion: a world held in the mind for months, sometimes years. Poetry can be written in smaller bursts, but it also allows a lifetime of experience to be compressed into something closer to an afterimage. For a man whose professional life was built around action, hierarchy, and external consequence, poetry offers a late-life form that privileges interior consequence: memory, regret, moral accounting, the residue of things done and witnessed.
The age markers matter. "60s and 70s" suggests not just retirement but a reckoning period, when the body starts setting terms and the past grows louder than the present. Coming from someone identified first as a soldier, the statement reads like a gentle demobilization: an expectation that the narrative drive of youth (plot, momentum, conquest) gives way to lyric attention (fragment, silence, ambiguity). It works because it doesn’t romanticize that turn. It treats art the way a veteran might treat weather: you adapt, you choose the gear you can still wear, and you learn to speak in the kind of sentences that survive the cold.
The subtext is about stamina and scale. Fiction asks for long, sustained immersion: a world held in the mind for months, sometimes years. Poetry can be written in smaller bursts, but it also allows a lifetime of experience to be compressed into something closer to an afterimage. For a man whose professional life was built around action, hierarchy, and external consequence, poetry offers a late-life form that privileges interior consequence: memory, regret, moral accounting, the residue of things done and witnessed.
The age markers matter. "60s and 70s" suggests not just retirement but a reckoning period, when the body starts setting terms and the past grows louder than the present. Coming from someone identified first as a soldier, the statement reads like a gentle demobilization: an expectation that the narrative drive of youth (plot, momentum, conquest) gives way to lyric attention (fragment, silence, ambiguity). It works because it doesn’t romanticize that turn. It treats art the way a veteran might treat weather: you adapt, you choose the gear you can still wear, and you learn to speak in the kind of sentences that survive the cold.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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