Images from a Collection: Just…Muckin’ Aboot

“It was so fine we lingered there for hours.
The long broad streets shone strongly after rain.
Sunset blinded the tremble of the crane
we watched from, dazed the heliport-towers.
The mile-high buildings flashed, flushed, greyed, went dark,
greyed, flushed, flashed, chameleons under flak
of cloud and sun. The last far thunder-sack
ripped and spilled its grumble. Ziggurat-stark,
a power-house reflected in the lead
of the old twilight river leapt alive
lit up at every window, and a boat
of students rowed past, slid from black to red
into the blaze. But where will they arrive
with all, boat, city, earth, like them, afloat?”

—Edwin Morgan, Clydegrad, Sonnets from Scotland, 1984

Born in Glasgow’s West End in April of 1920, Scottish poet and translator  Edwin George Morgan was associated with the Scottish Renaissance, the modernist literary movement which incorporated folk influences and held a strong concern for Scotland’s declining languages.

Edwin Morgan entered the University of Glasgow in 1937, where he studied Russian and French. During World WAr II, his studies were interrupted by his service as a conscientious objector member of the Royal Army Medical Corps in Egypt, the Lebanon, and Palestine. Morgan continued his studies after the war and graduated in 1947 with a first class Honors degree in English Language and Literature. Upon graduating, he took an offer as a lecturer in the English Department of Glasgow University; he was appointed a full professor in 1975 and retired from the university in 1980.

Morgan first published his work in the High School of Glasgow Magazine in 1936 under the name ‘Kaa’, and continued that nom de plume for his published work in the Glasgow University Magazine. Working after the war as translator and reviewer, he reverted to his own name in works published in a variety of periodicals. Morgan’s first collection of poems entitled “The Vision of Cathkin Braes” and his translation of “Beowulf” were both published in 1952. For fifty years, he continued the dual task of publishing his own work and translating others’ work from Russian, French, Italian, and Old English.

Edwin Morgan’s “A Second Life”, published in 1968, contained subjects which ranged from the marginalized populations of Glasgow and the misery of the tenements to times of laughter in the city and the famous lives of personalities such as Edith Pilaf and Marilyn Monroe. “A Second Life” became the volume that established his importance and signaled a private change and a public achievement in his life. In 1963 Morgan met and had fallen in love with John Scott, to whom he remained attached until Scott’s death in 1978. Though a concealed love due to the laws at the time, this union and Morgan’s discovery of the Beat poets’ writings formed a new awakening for him.

Morgan’s wide reading habit, his love of the cinema, and his defined musical taste all contributed to his poetry. He was always inquisitive and interested in the changes to technology and science, the whole history of the earth, and the dynamism of invention. A master of the classic form of poetry, Morgan continued through his career to invent new verse forms from his first concrete poems in 1963, which relies for part of its effect on the visual impact in the arrangement of words and spaces on the page, to the new stanzaic forms in his 2002 “Cathures”, with its poems’ cadence set to music, both classical and jaxx.

Throughout his early career Edwin Morgan had kept his sexuality hidden as homosexuality was not decriminalized in Scotland until 1980. At the age of seventy, he revealed his sexuality in the 1990 work “Nothing Not Giving Messages”, a collection of talks, poems and interviews, in which was included an interview with the Scottish poet and novelist Christopher Whyte about Morgan’s life and orientation.

Edwin Morgan’s work has received a number of prestigious accolades and has assumed an increasingly public role. In 1999 he became Glasgow’s first official Poet Laureate and a year later received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. In 2004, Morgan became Scotland’s first official national poet or ‘Scots Makar’, who is charged with ‘representing and promoting Scots poetry’.

In the years after his appointment to the Glasgow laureateship, Morgan was an active supporter of the repeal of Section 28, a law passed in 1988 that stopped councils and schools from “promoting the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”. In many public appearances he criticized Church and business leaders for their support of the ‘Keep the Clause’ campaign. This endorsement of gay rights and inclusive attitudes to social and cultural difference characterized Morgan’s publicly liberal stance in the 1990s and into the twenty-first century. Edwin Morgan died in Glasgow on August 19, 2010.

Additional information on the life of Edwin Morgan, as well as a small collection of complete poems, can be found at the Scottish Poetry Library located at: https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poet/edwin-morgan/