Art & Creativity Quote by Robert Morgan

Calling Larkin "the best books of our times" and then immediately shrinking them down to "very short books of poems" is a soldier's kind of praise: blunt, slightly suspicious of grandiosity, and laser-focused on what survives contact with reality. Robert Morgan isn’t dazzled by bulk or reputation. He’s admiring economy and control - virtues that map neatly onto military life, where excess gets you killed and planning is a form of care.

The word "mature" does heavy lifting. It signals not just late-career polish but an earned temperament: poems that have burned off youthful showing-off and settled into a disciplined voice. Morgan’s compliment is also a corrective to the era’s louder literary fashions. In a century that often equated importance with sprawl, ideology, or performance, he’s making a case for the opposite: that small, exacting objects can carry the most cultural weight.

"Very carefully arranged" points to Larkin’s book-making as craft, not mere accumulation. Morgan is praising sequencing - the way poems converse, undercut, and deepen each other when placed in order. Subtext: greatness isn’t only in individual lyrics; it’s in the architecture that turns separate moments into an emotional campaign.

There’s a quiet assertion here about modern life, too. The times are noisy, distracted, inflated. Larkin’s short volumes suggest a counter-model: attention as a moral act, restraint as style, and clarity as a kind of courage.