I dont think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that. – Robert Morgan
Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry. – Robert Morgan
The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end. – Robert Morgan
Pounds translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later. – Robert Morgan
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. – T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1919