Scottish quote of the week: Edwin Morgan

Published on 24/09/2012 18:24

Edwin Morgan (1920 - 2010) was one of the most imaginative, playful and best-loved Scottish writers of the 20th century, and spent the last years of his life as the first Scots Makar (Scotland’s national poet).

Although he crossed paths with the likes of Hugh MacDiarmid, Morgan was never as overt in his politics; instead he painted vivid linguistic pictures of the Glasgow and the Scotland he knew so well.

Morgan took some inspiration from the American beat poets and revelled in the sounds and shapes of the words themselves, perhaps never more than in the poem ‘Canedolia (An Off-Concrete Scotch Fantasia)’.

In the poem place names seep into Morgan’s joyful stream of consiousness as normal blocks of language, and the short quotation we’ve chosen is also immortalised in stone on the Canongate Wall at the Scottish Parliament:

tell us about last night

well, we had a wee ferintosh and we lay on the quiraing. It was pure stontian!