Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Morgan

There is a quietly bruised honesty in the way Morgan frames “teaching” as an intrusion, not a calling. The verb choice matters: intrusion suggests the classroom doesn’t merely compete for time; it enters the private space where poems are supposed to arrive unannounced, half-mysterious, still capable of surprising even their author. In that sense, the line is less a complaint than a diagnosis of how professionalism can sand down wonder. When you teach writing long enough, you start seeing the gears.

The specific intent is to name a trade-off that polite literary culture often romanticizes away. Teaching is usually cast as nourishment for the artist; Morgan admits it can be extraction. You spend your days breaking a living, breathing art into transferable moves: image, line break, tension, revision. Pedagogy requires repeatability. Poetry, at its best, resists it. The subtext is fear of becoming a technician of feeling, someone who can explain why a line works but no longer experiences that electric uncertainty that makes writing worth doing.

Context sharpens this. As a soldier, Morgan would have known systems, drills, and the emotional cost of turning instinct into procedure. His phrasing carries that martial suspicion of routine: repetition can keep you alive, but it can also numb you. Read this way, the “excitement” he mourns isn’t mere pleasure; it’s volatility, risk, the sense that the poem might exceed your control. Teaching, for all its value, can train you into safer choices, cleaner explanations, and fewer surprises. The ache in the sentence is the recognition that mastery has a shadow.