Born in New York City, the only child of well-to-do parents. Attending private schools, he had a sheltered childhood and spent much time alone reading. His father, a soap manufacturer, had enrolled him at birth in Princeton where the young Morgan began studying in 1939. At Princeton he met the newly-arrived instructor, Allen *Tate, who proved a decisive influence in shaping Morgan's literary interests. Graduating in 1943, Morgan served in the US Army's Tank Destroyer Corps. In 1947 he co-founded the Hudson Review, which quickly became one of the most influential American literary quarterlies. Early issues of Hudson Review featured Ezra *Pound and Wallace *Stevens; later on, poets such as A. R. *Ammons, W. S. *Merwin, Louis *Simpson, Anne *Sexton, and William *Stafford appeared first—or early in their careers—in the magazine. In one of his infrequent editorials, Morgan once alluded to forces in society ‘that would pervert art and stifle responsible criticism’. Thus it was all the more necessary ‘for an independent literary review to exercise its lonely prerogatives: of remaining accessible to the new and unexpected, of joining no coterie … and of maintaining the cleansing function of criticism as the revealer and scourge of fraud’.

He published a few early poems, but gradually abandoned verse for editorial responsibilities. Then in 1968 the suicide of his son, John, shocked Morgan back into poetry. His first collection, A Book of Changes (1972), published when the author was 50, met with wide approval. But it was not until Poems of the Two Worlds (1977), Death Mother (1979), and Northbook (1982) that critics realized the scope and originality of his poetic talent. The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry