Edwin Morgan is widely reckoned the foremost Scottish poet of the twentieth century, and he was, above all, Glasgow’s. Born in the city, he taught in its university for his whole working life and wrote it into literature as few cities have been written — its snack-bars and shipyards, its razor-gangs and demolitions, its humour and its hurt — and then, restlessly, projected it into outer space and the far future. He worked in every form from the strict sonnet to concrete poetry made of shapes on the page, and he became the city’s first Poet Laureate and, later, the whole nation’s first Makar.
The Glasgow Student
He was born on 27 April 1920 in Glasgow’s West End, the only child of undemonstrative Presbyterian parents — his father a director of a small firm of iron and steel merchants — and grew up in Pollokshields and Rutherglen in a house without books, a self-described swot who talked his parents into paying for book-club subscriptions to feed a hunger they did not share. He entered the University of Glasgow in 1937 to read French and Russian. Called up in 1940, he startled his conservative family by registering as a conscientious objector, and served the war non-combatantly with the Royal Army Medical Corps in Egypt, Lebanon and Palestine — experiences that surface in his later war poetry. He graduated with a first in 1947 and joined the staff of the university, where he would teach, and eventually hold a professorship, until his retirement in 1980.
The Second Life
Morgan came fully into his powers in the 1960s, a late and then unstoppable flowering announced by his collection The Second Life (1968). He was a restless experimenter — his concrete poems grew out of correspondence with practitioners across Europe and Brazil, and Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Wild Hawthorn Press published his first in 1963 — but also a master of traditional form, above all the sonnet. What binds the huge, various body of work is Glasgow. The Glasgow Sonnets look poverty and dereliction unflinchingly in the face; poems like ‘In the Snack-bar’, ‘Trio’, ‘The Starlings in George Square’ and ‘King Billy’ find tenderness, comedy and violence in the ordinary life of the streets. Alongside his own poetry he translated hundreds of poems from Russian, Hungarian, Italian and more, an act of internationalism from a poet who insisted a small country’s literature belonged to the world.
Laureate of City and Nation
Honours gathered late and warmly: an OBE in 1982, the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2000. In 1999 Glasgow made him its first Poet Laureate, and in 2004 he became the first Scots Makar — the national poet, the word an old Scots term for a maker of verse. That year he wrote a poem for the opening of the new Scottish Parliament building, too ill by then to read it himself, so that Liz Lochhead read it for him; it is a masterpiece of public poetry, at once celebratory and bracingly stern — a Parliament, he warned, should hold thinking people, not ‘a nest of fearties’ nor ‘forelock-tuggers’ muttering ‘it wizny me’. Few poets have spoken so directly to a nation at a hinge of its history.
A Voice for the Isolated
In 1990, aged seventy, Morgan spoke publicly for the first time about being gay, and his poetry of love and queer experience — subtle, generous, unafraid — became quietly important to social change in Scotland, a voice for the young and the isolated. He was a great encourager of others, his early support meaning much to writers including Alasdair Gray, Tom Leonard, Liz Lochhead and Jackie Kay; near the end he found a new young audience recording with the band Idlewild. Diagnosed with cancer in 1999, he wrote and lived undimmed for another decade, dying on 19 August 2010, aged ninety. He left much of his estate to endow an award for young Scottish poets — ensuring that the maker went on making makers.
His page belongs beside Alasdair Gray’s as the other half of Glasgow’s literary conscience: where Gray drew and narrated the city into being, Morgan sang it — and gave it, in his Parliament poem, its finest modern statement of what a people might hope to be.
The Glasgow connection
Morgan’s Glasgow is underfoot and everywhere: his lines set into the pavement of the Candleriggs in the Merchant City, the University of Glasgow where he taught for half a century and which keeps his archive, and the streets of Pollokshields and the city centre whose snack-bars, squares and starlings he turned into some of the best-loved poems the city has produced.
People also ask
Who was Edwin Morgan?
Widely regarded as the foremost Scottish poet of the twentieth century — and Glasgow’s own. A restless experimenter who worked in every form from the strict sonnet to concrete poetry, he wrote the city into literature as few cities have been.
What is a Makar?
The Makar is the national poet of Scotland — the word an old Scots term for a maker of verse. Morgan was the very first, appointed in 2004; he had earlier become Glasgow’s first Poet Laureate in 1999.
What are Edwin Morgan’s most famous poems?
Among them the Glasgow Sonnets, which look the city’s poverty in the face; the tender love poem ‘Strawberries’; ‘In the Snack-bar’ and ‘Trio’; and the poem he wrote for the opening of the Scottish Parliament in 2004, a masterpiece of public verse.
Was Edwin Morgan gay?
Yes. He spoke publicly about being gay for the first time in 1990, at the age of seventy, and his poetry of love and queer experience — generous and unafraid — became quietly important to changing attitudes in Scotland.
Where can you see Edwin Morgan’s poetry in Glasgow?
His lines are set into the pavement of the Candleriggs in the Merchant City, and the University of Glasgow — where he taught for half a century — keeps his archive. His words are woven through the city he loved.
When did Edwin Morgan die?
He died on 19 August 2010, aged 90, undimmed to the end, leaving much of his estate to endow an award for young Scottish poets.