Aging & Wisdom Quote by Robert Morgan

MTV and rock and roll aren’t just props here; they’re a dare. Morgan sets up a neat, almost taunting contrast between high-speed, mass-produced sensation and the slow, private labor of reading. The first two sentences sound like a shrug from someone conceding the obvious: if culture is a vending machine of noise and images, why choose the quietest item on the shelf? Then he pivots, and the contempt flips direction. Calling poetry “Stone Age” isn’t a dismissal so much as a rebranding: poetry isn’t obsolete, it’s elemental. It predates the marketplace.

The subtext is that modern entertainment doesn’t merely distract; it trains the nervous system to expect constant stimulus. Poetry, by comparison, demands a different kind of attention, one that can feel physically unfamiliar to people raised on screens. Morgan’s claim about “perceptions” suggests that poetry works less like information and more like a cognitive throwback - rhythm, repetition, metaphor, ritual speech. Not “content,” but an ancient interface for fear, awe, grief, desire.

The soldier’s vantage point sharpens the stakes. A life organized around consequence tends to distrust disposable feeling. In that context, “Stone Age” reads as survival tech: language that compresses experience when the world turns brutal or wordless. Morgan isn’t pleading for poetry’s relevance; he’s arguing it’s older than relevance, and that’s precisely why it can still cut through the cultural static.