Edwin Morgan RIP

Edwin Morgan
Edwin Morgan, who has died aged 90, was a poet, both scholarly and playful, who demonstrated a complete mastery of form and an amazingly wide sweep of subject matter. A subtle humorist with a sometimes tragic air, he was also a superb translator from several European languages.

Published: 6:38PM BST 19 Aug 2010

Morgan, never easily categorisable, displayed an attractive energy, openness and the conviction that nothing was off-limits for poetry to address. His verse concerned such topics as meetings with aliens and spaceships, but could also be about a story from that day’s newspaper or an encounter with reality in a Glasgow street.

His collection The Second Life (1968) covered a fairly typical thematic range: successive poems dealt with Ernest Hemingway; Marilyn Monroe; Edith Piaf; the domes of St Sophia in Istanbul; a white rhinoceros; a wolf; an Aberdeen train; and the opening of the Forth Road Bridge.

The forms he used were likewise eclectic — ranging from substantial sonnet sequences to experiments with concrete poetry. He was flexible, too, with language. He was equally at home in English and in Scots, and also made attempts to create the speech patterns of the Loch Ness Monster and of the inhabitants encountered by “The First Men on Mercury”— “Gawl horrop. Bawr. Abawrhannabanna!” for example.

Although well-known for its lightness of touch, and its sheer enthusiasm for the trivial and miraculous phenomena of the 20th century, Morgan’s poetry was often found to depend for its celebratory nature on catching a moment before it had gone forever — and so pointing up, first of all, the moment’s imminent passing.

In an early poem, The Cape of Good Hope (1955), he asked the reader to, “remember/ My voice and verse, and pardon in the hope/ The despair, for by the despair I spoke.” Although that was written at a dark time for him, and his most joyful verse was still to come, Morgan retained his melancholy vein throughout his career.

Edwin George Morgan was born in Glasgow on April 27 1920, the only child of Stanley and Madge Morgan. His father, who had started as a clerk at a small firm of iron and steel merchants, was to end up a director. Even as a child, Edwin’s self-absorption disturbed his loving, but rigorously Presbyterian, parents.

He was educated at Rutherglen Academy, where he was unhappy; his fellow pupils labelled him a swot, although he maintained: “I just happened to get good marks.” From there he transferred to Glasgow High, where he began to write long, fantastic prose narratives, influenced by Verne, Wells and Burroughs. At 17 he enrolled at Glasgow University where, while reading English, he pursued his interest in American poets (e.e. cummings, Robert Lowell, Laura Riding) but also absorbed poetry in various European languages, particularly French and Russian. It was the beginning of his interest in translation.

By the end of his career he was to have translated from French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian and Hungarian among other languages; the authors included Yevtushenko, Pasternak, Mayakovsky, Montale, Quasimodo, Lorca and Brecht. In 2001 he won the Weidenfeld Prize for Translation.

His Beowulf (1952) became a standard translation in America, while his Scots version of Cyrano de Bergerac (1992) was staged in a highly-acclaimed touring production by the Communicado company.

On the outbreak of the Second World War, Morgan registered as a conscientious objector; but, before his case could be heard, he came to believe that there was no alternative to war with Germany. He therefore asked permission to serve with the RAMC, and did so, with the 42nd General Hospital in Egypt, Palestine and the Lebanon, from 1940 to 1946.

He then completed his (first-class) degree at Glasgow, where he became an assistant lecturer, and in 1950 a lecturer. He was at this time a particularly troubled person, by no means at peace with his homosexuality, of which he had been aware since his school days. Various casual affairs caused extensive misery, but in 1963, when he met John Scott, a working-class storeman from a Catholic family, Morgan at last found a relationship of romantic, enduring, reciprocated love. It was Scott who gave Morgan the capacity for joy which inspired much of his best later work; and the title The Second Life refers to the new lease Morgan felt he received through his love. Poems of Years (1982) is dedicated to Scott, who died in 1978.

Homosexuality was not decriminalised in Scotland until 1980, and Morgan, characteristically impish, “came out” officially only on his 70th birthday. But his work had long since made matters plain. The New Divan (1977), for example, which recreates the exotic world of his wartime experience, tells of an affair which ended when the authorities posted the man elsewhere. By the 1980s even the titles — Dear man, my love goes out in waves — told all. But he maintained official reticence to ensure that he was not confined in the role of “gay poet”.

Although highly academic, Morgan was extremely open to foreign influences such as the Black Mountain poets, the Beats, Russian modernism and Portuguese concrete poets, as well as being excited by the liberating influence of pop music (he recently collaborated with the Scottish band Idlewild). He was not keen on, or worthy of, being pigeonholed.

He became Senior Lecturer at Glasgow in 1965, a Reader in 1971 and Professor in 1975. He retired in 1980 and was a visiting professor of English at Strathclyde University from 1987 to 1990.

In 2004 a poem he wrote for the opening of the Scottish Parliament building was read at the occasion. He continued to publish volumes of poetry in his old age, in April this year bringing out a book of new and uncollected poems, Dreams and Other Nightmares.

Morgan was appointed OBE in 1982, and received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2000.

In 1999 he was named Glasgow’s first Poet Laureate, and in 2004 as the first Scottish national poet, The Scots Makar — shortly afterwards the Heritage Lottery Fund awarded the Scottish Poetry Library a £50,000 grant to acquire and house Morgan’s extensive archive.

He won Scottish Arts Council Book Awards in 1968, 1973, 1977, 1978, 1983, 1985, 1988, 1991 and 1992. In 1983, for Poems of Thirty Years, he shared the Saltire Society Award for Best Scottish Book of the Year, and two years later he won the Soros Translation Award for translations from Attila Jozsef. He blew the prize-money on a day-trip by Concorde to the North Pole, where he met Father Christmas.

Latterly Morgan had been suffering from cancer and was being cared for in a residential home in Glasgow. Although often in pain, he said recently: “Scientists will be working on that, I feel quite sure. But even if they overcome it, there is one big overhanging effect to it all — the knowledge that you’re not going to live for very much longer. And that can make you very pessimistic — or it can make you very determined not to be pessimistic. I prefer the second option.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/7954871/Edwin-Morgan.html