Poet WN Herbert pays tribute to Edwin Morgan

EDWIN Morgan, who died on Thursday aged 90, was the last of the most distinguished generation of Scottish poets since Hogg and Scott.

His peers included George Mackay Brown, Robert Garioch, WS Graham, Sorley MacLean, Iain Crichton Smith, and Norman MacCaig.

Behind these stood the still more towering figure of Hugh MacDiarmid, whose programme for Scottish letters Morgan took on and adapted to his own gentler, more inclusive genius. His death concludes a period in which Scottish poetry came to extraordinary maturity. He may prove the most adventurous, diverse and popular of its poets: the age of MacDiarmid may yet be seen to have given way to the age of Morgan.

He had the ability to inspire delight and affection in his audiences through decades of marvellously entertaining readings. He also influenced profoundly younger generations of Scottish poets, and was an indefatigable supporter of the new. Many of us in the arts in Scotland are sons and daughters of Eddie.

Morgan was born in Glasgow in 1920. After serving in the Medical Corps during the Second World War, he returned to Glasgow University, eventually teaching English Literature. He came fully into his own voice late, partly through reading the Beats in the 1960s, whereupon he helped to transform Glasgow into the literary capital of Scotland.

He retired from teaching in 1980, came out as gay on his 70th birthday, was appointed first Glasgow's then Scotland's Makar or laureate, and, energetic as ever, embarked on a late career as dramatist and librettist.

Throughout his life Morgan made it his mission to celebrate our social and technological progress. His poetry, though responsive to local divisions and global conflict, always hymned the human capacity for love and invention. Its embodiments are amplitude, vividity, restlessness and compassion. He was infatuated with language, much drawn to its battered, colloquial beauties, receptive to the spell-making of arcane vocabularies, and had an ear for the memorable phrase lurking in jargon. He looked overseas for subject and solidarity, allowing other literatures to rejuvenate him through the hard graft of translation.

Among his poetry's many avatars, perhaps the figure of Cinquevalli comes closest to describing its creator's nature: Cinquevalli is a famous juggler. In a thousand theatres, in every continent, he is the best, the greatest. After eight years perfecting he can balance one billiard ball on another billiard ball on top of a cue on top of a third billiard ball in a wine glass held in his mouth. To those who say the balls are waxed, or flattened, he patiently explains the trick will only work because the spheres are absolutely true.

There is no deception in him.

He is true.

Right up to the end of his life Morgan was writing big books full of diverse verses. In some he would make high cultural gestures, like the poem in ottava rima in which Byron, a bit more Scottish than you might remember, survives Missolonghi. In others he would explore a rougher, confrontational music, like the homosexual encounters of Glasgow Green.

He was a master of the gestures of form, whether writing shocking sonnets, or teasing the reader's brain with new creations - concrete poems, off-concrete poems, colour poems (and a few off-colour ones), computer poems, emergent poems, sound and sci-fi poems. He always demonstrated his joy in the small print of being alive.

That capacity to straddle the divide between the so-called traditional and the allegedly experimental is another of the lessons taught by this quietest of dominies. For Morgan there weren't two poetries, one accessible and the other obscure: his imagination acknowledged no such divide, instead, truly original, he only declared allegiance to the work, to the next poem and the next.

This independence of spirit governed his approach to the Makarship. He made it clear he was laureate of the Scottish Imagination, not the Scottish Executive, asserting, magnificently, that "we poets are free spirits and we distrust the establishment". His first gesture was to express disapproval of the medieval title, preferring to be associated with post-Independence Scotland, rather than its pre-Reformation incarnation, and he drove the point home by writing a trenchant call for a Scottish republic:

...what's to come, not what has been

Drives us charged and tingling-new

To score our story on the blue.

His example, then, grounds us as a culture. He didn't oppose MacDiarmid's call for Scottish poetry to become a "Mature Art", rather, in the poetry of his long maturity, he renewed that which was vibrant and daring about his peers and predecessors, and dispensed with all the poisoned prejudice and bonny prince chauvinism.

He, crucially, refused to be partisan: he never excluded, in order to correct or castigate, any aspect of what it is to be human, and he never lost sight of our position in an unhuman (not inhumane) universe, making the radical argument that artistic variousness is, in itself, a resistance to dogma: "The world, history, society, everything in it, pleads to become a voice, voices!"

In the end Morgan was as great a poet of voices as the Burns of Holy Willie's Prayer.

He gave words to apples, to starlings, to sputniks, to Mercurians, to a mummy, to his old hero Jack London, and, in the most daring of his late poems, a piece possessed of grave and disturbing wit, to Gorgo, a cancer cell:

The joy of kicking decent cells away,

sucking their precious nutrients, piercing

Membranes that try to keep you from the waves

Of lymph and blood you long to navigate -

Through unimaginable dangers, be robust! -

Until you reach those Islands of the Blest - …

The distant organs where you plant your flag

and start a colony. Those cells are heroes,

Homer would hymn them, but I do my best!

These lines, written when diagnosed with prostate cancer, demonstrate the integrity and lack of sentiment with which Morgan articulated the unsaid or even unsayable. His considerable imagination remained in a heightened state of freedom, and as a nation we are indebted to his diction, his directness, and his audacity. v

Dundonian WN Herbert is Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Newcastle University. He has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and twice for the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year.

bc