Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Morgan

Form is the easiest part of poetry to counterfeit, and Robert Morgan is calling the bluff. His line lands like a field test: rhyme and meter are uniforms, not valor. You can march syllables into neat ranks, you can click end-words into place, you can even pull off the dignified austerity of blank verse, and still produce something dead on arrival. The jab is aimed at a perennial temptation: confusing compliance with craft.

Morgan, a soldier by profession, brings an implicit moral seriousness to an aesthetic argument. In military life, polish can be performance; drill can look like readiness. He’s pointing out the civilian cousin of that illusion in literary culture: the tendency of institutions (teachers, gatekeepers, even poets themselves) to treat recognizable technique as proof of meaning. Rhyme becomes a credential. Blank verse becomes a badge of “real literature.” The subtext is skeptical, almost disciplinary: stop hiding behind the rules; show the lived pressure, the surprise, the earned music.

What makes the remark work is its demystifying bluntness. It doesn’t romanticize inspiration, but it refuses the opposite romance too: the fantasy that a template can do the hard work for you. Morgan’s era straddled high-modernist suspicion of ornament and a classroom culture that often reduced poetry to scansion and schemes. He’s insisting that whatever we call “good” has to be felt in the voltage of language, image, and necessity - not in the fact that the poem successfully wore the costume.