"The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse"
About this Quote
The barb is in “Almost no one.” It’s not a nuanced claim about verse novels or epic traditions; it’s a deliberately flattening generalization, the kind you make when you’ve stopped arguing with ideals and started accounting for outcomes. Narrative in verse demands time, a tolerance for compression, and a willingness to be slowed down by sound. Prose promises speed, clarity, plot-forward momentum. Morgan’s subtext is that modern reading habits prize consumption over ceremony: we want story as throughput, not story as performance.
Context matters here: a soldier speaking about literary form carries an implicit awareness of audiences as masses, not salons. Soldiers live inside institutions where communication is optimized and sentimentality can get you killed. That background makes his statement feel like an extension of logistical thinking: adapt to the terrain, don’t insist the terrain adapt to you.
There’s also a quiet lament hidden inside the pragmatism. If readers have effectively voted verse narrative off the island, something more than a genre preference has been lost: a mode of storytelling that forces attention to cadence, memory, and the physical pleasure of language. Morgan isn’t merely endorsing prose. He’s recording a cultural surrender.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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| Source | Help us find the source |
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Morgan, Robert. (2026, January 17). The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-decision-to-write-in-prose-instead-of-poetry-76474/
Chicago Style
Morgan, Robert. "The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-decision-to-write-in-prose-instead-of-poetry-76474/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-decision-to-write-in-prose-instead-of-poetry-76474/. Accessed 17 Feb. 2026.
