Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Morgan

A soldier admitting he wanted poems to sound like "a real person talking" is less an aesthetic preference than a tactical repositioning. The late 60s and early 70s weren’t just a stylistic era; they were a credibility crisis. Public language was getting scrubbed and weaponized - by governments managing Vietnam, by television compressing catastrophe into nightly segments, by protest rhetoric hardening into slogans. Against that backdrop, Morgan’s turn toward voice and narration reads like a bid to reclaim speech from institutions that had made it feel unreal.

The phrase "embodying the voice" does quiet but heavy work. It suggests a body behind the words, breath and nerves, not the abstracted lyric "I" that can float above consequence. For someone marked as a soldier, that insistence carries extra charge: war trains you to distrust ornamental language because euphemism gets people killed. "Making the poem sound like a real person talking" is an argument against the kind of poetry that hides behind polish, where emotion is implied but never risked.

There’s also a subtle democratic impulse here. Narration and character-voice pull poetry toward the stories people tell each other when the official story doesn’t hold. It’s not anti-art; it’s anti-pretension, anti-distance. Morgan’s intent is to make the poem accountable - to make it answerable to lived experience, where a voice isn’t just style, it’s evidence.