Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Morgan

Taste here becomes a kind of quiet rebellion: a soldier, of all people, praising the most “traditional” version of a famously experimental school. Black Mountain poetry gets shorthand as austere, heady, and hard-edged - projective verse, composition-by-field, the whole mid-century avant-garde mythos. Morgan swerves around that mythology and pins his affection to “early Creeley,” the moment before the style calcified into a brand. It’s a preference for the human pulse over the manifesto.

Calling those poems “very lyrical and very traditional” isn’t an insult; it’s a reclamation. He’s insisting that even inside a movement known for breaking forms, what lasts is the oldest equipment poetry has: a speaking voice with grain, quirk, and emotional weather. “A lot of voice and character” is the giveaway. Morgan is responding less to technique than to presence - the feeling that a poem is inhabited, not merely constructed.

The subtext is also institutional. By the time Black Mountain became a canonical label, readers were trained to admire the difficulty, the innovations, the historical importance. Morgan’s sentence resists that dutiful reverence. As a soldier, he’s likely allergic to aesthetic posturing: he’s seen what happens when systems turn people into abstractions. So he gravitates toward Creeley at his most intimate, when the line breaks still sound like speech and the “I” feels earned.

It’s a small act of criticism with big implications: the avant-garde survives not by being new, but by staying personal.