Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Morgan

Memorability is Morgan's blunt battlefield test for art: if the lines don’t stick, they didn’t do the job. Coming from a soldier, that standard carries an implied ethics. In military life, memory isn’t a parlor trick; it’s survival, ritual, training, the thing you can carry when everything else is stripped away. So when he treats “memorable” as a nonnegotiable, he’s not just making a taste claim. He’s proposing a discipline.

The jab at free verse isn’t really about liberty versus rules; it’s about accountability. Traditional forms come with built-in technologies of recall: meter, rhyme, pattern, compression. They force choices, and those choices leave grooves in the reader’s mind. Free verse can do that too, but it doesn’t automatically. Morgan’s subtext is that too much of it confuses the absence of constraints with the presence of craft, mistaking looseness for authenticity. If nothing in a poem is sharpened enough to be repeated, remembered, recited, then it risks becoming disposable language dressed up as literature.

There’s also a cultural critique hiding in the phrasing: “much of the free verse poetry” reads like an observation about an era where publication and prestige can reward vibe over structure. Morgan isn’t nostalgic for rhyme as a costume; he’s arguing that poems should earn their permanence. In a century of noise, he’s insisting on the one trait that resists it: the line you can’t shake.