"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"
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Morgan’s line is less a craft tip than a cold dispatch from the supply lines of culture: form doesn’t “win” because artists choose it, it wins because audiences fund it with attention. By framing prose as a decision “made more by the readers,” he strips writers of the romantic fantasy of total agency and replaces it with a market reality. If you want narrative to travel far, you pack it in the container people will actually open.
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.
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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