Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Morgan

Pound’s China arrives here not as a syllabus item but as a field ration: something a soldier reads that rewires what language can do when the world is loud, brutal, and immediate. Robert Morgan’s “maybe” is doing real work. It’s the hedge of someone wary of grand claims, but it also signals a private certainty: that Pound’s translations (often less faithful than catalytic) offered a new kind of precision. Imagist clarity, stripped syntax, the feeling of a scene presented without moralizing - that can be oxygen to a mind trained by military life, where detail matters and sentiment can be lethal.

The subtext is also about permission. Pound’s Chinese poems, filtered through a modernist ear, propose that you can be serious without being ornate, emotional without being confessional. For a soldier, that’s not just aesthetics; it’s a survival technique. The line implies a before-and-after in how Morgan understood experience: not as something to explain, but something to render cleanly.

“Eliot a little bit later” sketches a cultural trajectory in miniature: first the shock of condensed image, then the architecture of disillusionment. Pound gives the method; Eliot gives the diagnosis. Coming “later” suggests both chronology and temperament: Eliot’s irony, fragmentation, and spiritual exhaustion require a reader already broken in. Morgan’s two-step reading list is basically a map of 20th-century modernity entering an individual life through war, not academia.