Love Quote by Robert Morgan

Morgan is selling poetry as a kind of durable technology: not useful because it’s new, but because it’s old in the particular way that confers permission. The word “authority” does the heavy lifting here. Poetry isn’t just admired for beauty; it’s trusted. It arrives with the aura of inherited form, like a uniform or a ritual, implying that someone before us already tested these sounds against chaos and found them fit to carry meaning.

That framing makes sense from a soldier. In military life, legitimacy often comes from lineage: traditions, drills, codes, ranks. You don’t improvise your way into coherence when the stakes are life and death; you rely on forms that have outlasted individual temperaments. Morgan’s “ancient language and ancient form” is a quiet argument against the suspicion that poetry is ornamental. He positions it as a discipline, not a flourish - a way of speaking that has survived catastrophe and therefore feels reliable when ordinary speech fails.

The subtext is also a subtle defense against modernity’s churn. Calling poetry “timeless” isn’t neutral; it’s a rebuke to the disposable present, to language that updates so quickly it can’t hold memory. “It reaches back” suggests that the comfort we take in poems is partly genealogical: they let us borrow a larger past, inhabit continuity, and feel less stranded in our own moment. The intent isn’t nostalgia so much as ballast. When everything else is contingent, form becomes a promise.