Events | 2010.08.19
Edwin Morgan, Scotland's national poet, dies aged 90
Carol Ann Duffy and others pay tribute to a \'generous, gentle genius\' known for the variety and inventiveness of his work
Called "poetry\'s true son" by Carol Ann Duffy, Scottish poet Edwin Morgan has died aged 90.
Winner of the Queen\'s Gold Medal for Poetry, Morgan was known for the range and variety of his writing. Equally at home translating poetry from many languages (he won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize for his version of Jean Racine\'s Phèdre), experimenting with concrete poetry , writing on topics from film to science fiction and in forms from sonnets to librettos, he was appointed the first Scots Makar (national poet of Scotland) in 2004 after serving as Glasgow\'s inaugural poet laureate. His death was announced this morning by the Scottish Poetry Library.
"Of course we have been expecting this for some time, but it still very upsetting," said Scottish Poetry Library director, Robyn Marsack, who described Morgan variously as "the brightest star in our sky", the most influential Scottish poet of the last 50 years and an "energising model" for other poets.
"A star goes on giving light long afterwards, as he will," Marsack said. "Edwin Morgan was not only our national poet – widely read, studied at school, much loved by fellow authors as well as readers – but our international poet: a marvellous translator from many languages and, equally, translated into many languages. He was a star of the international concrete poetry movement of the 1960s. His inventiveness is matched by his accessibility, a rare combination of formal skills, intellectual curiosity and emotional power."
Carol Ann Duffy, the poet laureate, also paid tribute to Morgan, calling him "poetry\'s true son". "A great, generous, gentle genius has gone," she said. "He is quite simply irreplaceable. I\'m certain that everyone who performs or attends at the Edinburgh international book festival will be thinking of him with love and gratitude."
Morgan turned 90 in April, an occasion marked with a new poetry publication, Dreams and Other Nightmares, as well as a volume of tributes from authors including Duffy, Alasdair Gray, Ali Smith, Andrew Motion and Janice Galloway.
Contributor Seamus Heaney wrote that Morgan had "the true poet\'s ability to convey innocent joy while maintaining the highest seriousness". Visiting him in 2005 to "pay formal homage to Scotland\'s poet laureate", Heaney said he "recognised the unpretentiousness and shyness" he\'d seen in his fellow poet before. "But now I was shy myself in the presence of one who had done such magnificent work as poet and translator, whose mind and hand went together, who cast a warm eye on life and whose achievement shines fuller and steadier as the decades pass," wrote the Irish poet.
The author of more than 60 books, Morgan\'s 2007 collection A Book of Lives was shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize and won the Sundial Scottish Arts Council book of the year award.
Born in Glasgow in 1920, Morgan studied at the city\'s high school and university, joining the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1940 before recommencing his studies in 1946. He taught English for more than 30 years at the University of Glasgow, where he was appointed professor in 1975, taking early retirement in 1980. The poet had also been awarded a handful of honorary degrees, as well as an OBE in 1982. "I was born in Glasgow and have lived most of my life there, and whatever image the city has to the outside world, to me it underlies and pervades my feeling at a deep level of identification and sympathy," he said.
Morgan is known for his love poetry. A gay man in a country where homosexuality was not decriminalised until 1980, he was obliged in earlier works to be discreet when naming his subjects, often plumping for labels such as "my honey" and "my love". He came out publicly at the age of 70, in 1990. "It took a long time for me to risk being unguarded," he said in a 2008 interview. "But I had a confidence that I would be able to be open eventually – and meanwhile it was so much a part of my own life and character that it was bound to be a part of the poetry."
Poet Sean O\'Brien has praised Morgan\'s writing for its "extremely rare combination of epic scope with lightness of touch".
"There appears to be nothing Morgan is not interested in, nothing he considers too small to deserve or too big to lend itself to his attention, no form he will not explore," he wrote in 2007 .
"A great deal more could be said of Morgan\'s work without even touching on his equally productive and distinguished career as a translator from many languages, which locates him in the proud tradition of Scottish internationalism; or his activities as a playwright and librettist; or his essays and criticism. Suffice it to say that, for the reader, the rewards of his writings are as prodigious as their scale."
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/aug[...]-morgan-scotland-national-poet
