Edwin Morgan (poet)

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Edwin George Morgan FRSE OBE (born April 27, 1920 in Glasgow ; † August 17, 2010 ibid) was a Scottish poet and literary critic who received the Cholmondeley Award in 1968 and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2000 . In 2004 he became Poet Laureate of Scotland (Scots Makar ).

Life

Poem by Morgan on a pavement in Glasgow

After attending school, Morgan studied at the University of Glasgow and did his alternative service in the Royal Army Medical Corps after previous conscientious objection during the Second World War . At this time he wrote his first poems. After the end of the war in 1947 he became an assistant lecturer in English at the University of Glasgow.

At the beginning of the 1950s he began his literary activity and published in 1952 both the Vision of Cathkin Braes, his first volume of poetry and a translation of the epic heroic poem Beowulf . While his first lyrical works appeared rather introverted and gloomy, later works radiated increasingly optimism and, as in A Second Life (1968), also dealt with their own homosexuality . In 1968 he was awarded the Cholmondeley Award.

In 1975 he took over a professorship for English studies at the University of Glasgow, where he taught until his retirement in 1980. At the same time, he acquired a reputation as a translator for numerous well-known writers such as Boris Leonidowitsch Pasternak , Alexander Sergejewitsch Pushkin and Federico García Lorca and gave a collection of these Translations published under the title Rites of Passage (1976). In 1990, both an - albeit incomplete - collection of his poems entitled Collected Poems and Crossing The Border , a collection of his most influential essays and literary reviews , appeared in quick succession . Later work that received much attention was the literary adaptation of Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac in a demotic Glaswegian dialect and the translation of Jean Racine's Phèdre into Scottish under the title Phaedra (2000).

Morgan, who became the Glasgow Poet Laureate in 1999, also received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2000.

Publications

  • Flower of evil , 1943
  • The vision of Cathkin Braes, and other poems , 1952
  • Beowulf , 1967
  • Futura-Emergent Poems , 1967
  • Gnomes , 1968
  • The second life. Poems , 1968
  • New English dramatists 14 , 1970
  • Glasgow sonnets , 1972
  • Instamatic poems , 1972
  • From Glasgow to Saturn , 1973
  • Hugh MacDiarmid , 1976
  • August Platen. Selected Poems , 1978
  • Twentieth century Scottish classics , 1987
  • Nothing not giving messages , 1990

Background literature

  • R. Fulton: Contemporary Scottish Poetry , 1974
  • Marshall Walker: Edwin Morgan: an interview , 1977
  • Hamish Whyte: Edwin Morgan , 1980
  • Geddes Thomson: The poetry of Edwin Morgan , 1986
  • Colin Nicholson: Edwin Morgan: Inventions of Modernity , 2002
  • Rodney Stenning Edgecombe: Aspects of Form and Genre in the Poetry of Edwin Morgan , 2003
  • Chris Jones: Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry , 2006

Web links and sources

personal data
SURNAME Morgan, Edwin
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Morgan, Edwin George (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Scottish poet and literary critic
DATE OF BIRTH April 27, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Glasgow
DATE OF DEATH 17th August 2010
Place of death Glasgow