Edwin Morgan's principal achievement in poetry has been to revive some of the modernist spirit of linguistic adventure and play, otherwise mostly defunct in Britain for several decades. His poems and ...
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Critical Essay by Julian Symons
[The Second Life] contains straightforward verse and (printed on differently-coloured paper) concrete poems. [Morgan] is certainly the wittiest and least pretentious p...
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Critical Essay by Alan Young
Edwin Morgan is a Scottish poet who has achieved original and interesting results by employing experimental methods which dislocate conventional poetic vocabulary and syn...
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Critical Essay by Dick Davis
Edwin Morgan's Poems of Thirty Years is a curate's egg of a book. Large stretches of it are only intermittently comprehensible (e.g. 'The New Divan&#...
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Critical Essay by John Lucas
[Poems of Thirty Years] brings together a vast amount of original work remarkable for its variety and skill. The skill is sometimes frittered away on sound and concrete p...
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Critical Essay by Alasdair D.f. Macrae
The thirty years in the title of [Poems of Thirty Years] run from 1952 to 1982 and over this period Edwin Morgan has been remarkably productive…. Abroad ...
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Critical Essay by John Wain
[Morgan] makes statements, lots of them, and his poems are not ingenious but deeply intelligent. Since the death of Auden, who brought a tremendous range of speculation an...
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Critical Essay by Martin Dodsworth
[Morgan's semi-concrete] poems must be taken in their entirety or not at all. They will not be fragmented (which is, I take it, the justification for their e...
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Critical Essay by Thomas E. Luddy
Edwin Morgan's prodigious talent has [in The Second Life] produced one of the most refreshing collections of poems I have read. They range in tone from light ...
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Critical Essay by Anne Cluysenaar
Perhaps because pity is the predominant sentiment of Glasgow Sonnets, as I read them, run a close second by indignation, the poor of that city appear as if at a dist...
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Critical Essay by Alan Brownjohn
From Glasgow to Saturn collects, interestingly, most of the many facets of Morgan's poetic personality: one gets for the first time some sense of the whole oeu...
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Critical Essay by Dabney Stuart
Most of [From Glasgow to Saturn] is graduate school diddling with all kinds of neat-o stuff: science fiction, American westerns, typographic calisthenics, computer cre...
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Critical Essay by John Matthias
Morgan's range is wide. Wide enough, in fact, to touch both of the antagonistic poles of Scottish poetry—Ian Hamilton Finlay and Hugh MacDiarmid—a...
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Critical Essay by Desmond Graham
Whether in the individual poem, the sequence or the collection, Edwin Morgan makes a plurality of styles into a thoroughgoing eclecticism. At once unpretentious and d...
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Critical Essay by Michael Schmidt
Poetry, Edwin Morgan says, should 'acknowledge its environment'. It can do this in the development of its themes, in its imagery—drawing from pa...
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Edwin (George) Morgan
Critical Essay by Julian Symons
