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 daring his range of production over the past twenty-five years is almost worryingly wide. His wit has done as much as anything to make the "Concrete" and "Sound" poem respectable and accessible. His refusal to decry the contemporary or to set barriers between modes has led to poems using, for example, the terms of space-fiction. He is a tireless translator or adapter…. Theoretically, his work could be seen as the inevitable inheritance of the movements of this century's art—pragmatic, multiformed and experimental in technique. Yet the very judgement and tact which protects each element of his enterprise from the least smear of opportunism can seem to limit, even to tame, its impact. Free of what Robert Lowell has described as his American generation's vice of seeking a unique voice in one's poetry, he can seem voiceless, welcome in every style because he brings little of himself to trouble it. It is easy and understandable to thus misrepresent Morgan's work, and it has taken his most sustained effort so far, the title sequence of one hundred poems in The New Divan, to dislodge my own doubts. But first, the other half of this packed collection. Here we have Morgan the impersonator, extending the idea of the persona or mask to include the voices of creatures from another planet, or those of inanimate objects—a streak of lightning or a shattered windscreen, or in his series of 'Ten Theatre Poems' the voice of a drum, a fan-dancer's fan or a cod-piece. Such roles for the poet Morgan are not masks for himself but attempts to enter the quiddity of a world which is not ego-centred. When he does write directly of human situations his characteristic position is that of someone—foreign correspondent or tragedian's messenger—sending interim despatches from a world viewed as eye-witness: a collection of physical impressions, words, half-understood connections. There will be consequences; there are causes; but here, in mid-stream, the patterns are half-known, always provisional. (pp. 76-7)
Reading through the poems of this second half, a consistency, more in an area of preoccupation than in a distinct line of thought, gradually impresses itself. You realise that the provisional place of the poet in each poem is in fact a way of truly reflecting a view of time, of language, of experience. The words of a Concrete poem can fracture to a beautiful pattern (as a windscreen fractures) or they can discompose to a stuttering fear. That either can happen, and a score of other things, shows us it is not just his style that is eclectic but the world itself…. In the space-fiction poem at the collection's centre, 'Memories of Earth', it is made clear that such an outlook is not disregarding of the human consequences of such disorder.
This is a free excerpt of 482 words. There are 1,090 words (approx.
4 pages at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Morgan, Edwin (George) 1920–: Critical Essay by Desmond Graham Access Pass.
