Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Morgan

Poetry doesn’t just deliver meaning; it performs meaning. When Robert Morgan says it “calls attention to its language and form,” he’s drawing a bright line between poetry as a transparent vehicle (like a memo, a report, an order) and poetry as an object you’re meant to notice, turn in your hands, and hear from multiple angles. The intent is almost corrective: if you read a poem as if it’s supposed to disappear into its message, you’re missing the point. The surface is the substance.

That “almost by definition” is doing quiet work. It suggests a soft boundary policing: poetry can be many things, but if it doesn’t foreground its own making - rhythm, compression, sound, line breaks, metaphorical pressure - then it’s drifting toward prose or mere statement. Morgan isn’t worshipping ornament; he’s describing a craft logic. Form isn’t decoration stapled onto emotion. Form is how the emotion becomes legible, repeatable, sharable.

The subtext sharpens given his profession. A soldier lives inside language designed to be unnoticed: commands that must be obeyed, jargon that streamlines complexity, euphemisms that make violence administratively manageable. Against that, poetry’s insistence on being noticed reads like resistance. It slows the reader down. It refuses the fantasy that words are neutral.

Contextually, Morgan’s line lands as a defense of attention in an age of utility. Poetry’s “definition” here is not elitism; it’s a demand that language be felt, not merely used.