The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.

Morley frames poetic creation as a deliberate, risky proximity to psychological extremity. The “door that leads into madness” suggests the borderland where imagination, obsession, and altered perception can tip from insight into breakdown. The poet’s courage is not to fling that door open—i.e., to surrender to chaos—but to keep it “ajar,” maintaining controlled access to the irrational and the unconscious. In this view, art depends on flirting with disorder while retaining enough discipline to shape it into language and form. The line also implies an ethical or existential bravery: to face unsettling inner material rather than retreat into safe conventionality.