Edwin Morgan is Scotland's first national poet - Scotland's version of Poet Laureate. Born in Glasgow in on 27th April 1920, he celebrated his 80th birthday in 2000. He was brought up in a comfortable middle class family with his father working as a clerk to a firm of ship breakers. From an early age Morgan was fascinated and passionate about words; he remembers his teachers complaining about the amount of work he would give them to mark. His early education was at Rutherglen Academy, then Glasgow High School. He has been a resident of Glasgow for the duration of his life, apart from his six year service in the Middle East with the Royal Army Medical Corps. On his return he completed his Master's degree at Glasgow University before teaching there, becoming Professor of English in 1975. He retired as Professor Emeritus in 1980. He has since worked as a Visiting Professor at Strathclyde University (1987-1990) and also at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth (1991-1995). A former pupil of Morgan's and a notable poet himself, Robert Crawford, recalls that Morgan was 'an extremely lively teacher ... incredibly focused on what his students were doing.'
Morgan is an also adept linguist, particularly in Russian, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Hungarian. This is demonstrated in his translations of Mayakovsky, Racine and Neruda, which he characteristically translates into robust Scots.
His prolific career has also been a prize-winning one. He has received a Queen's Gold Award for Poetry, his collections have several times been selected as Poetry Book Society Choices and Recommendations. He was awarded the Royal Bank of Scotland Book of the Year Award in 1983, the Soros Translation Award (New York) in 1985 and won numerous Scottish Arts Council Book Awards. His poetry collection, Virtual and Other Realities, won the Stakis Prize for the Scottish Writer of the Year 1998.
Morgan's poetry is praised for its inventiveness and its moral and social observations. He has written concrete and visual poetry, opera libretti and collaborated with jazz saxophonist Tommy Smith to put his work into music. His work is also renowned for its outwardly-looking internationalism, moving his poetic gaze from Europe to the wider world and into space, but always returning to his native Glasgow.
De Quincey in Glasgow
Twelve thousand drops of laudanum a day
kept him from shrieking. Wrapped in a duffle
buttoned to the neck, he made his shuffle,
door, table, window, table, door, bed, lay
on bed, sighed, groaned, jumped from bed, sat and wrote
till the table was white with pages, rang
for his landlady, ordered mutton, sang
to himself with pharmacies in his throat.
When afternoons grew late, he feared and longed
for dusk. In that high room in Rottenrow
he looks out east to the Necropolis.
Its crowded tombs rise jostling, living, thronged
with shadows, and the granite-bloodying glow
flares on the dripping bronze of a used kris.
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