Edwin Morgan Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Michael Schmidt

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 particulars of place and time—or in its approach to language, reproducing in the word order or in the word itself specific processes of the environment. In a sequence of poems called 'Interferences', for instance, the failure of language in various extreme circumstances is expressed in the deformation of certain words at the climax of the experience; in the 'Glasgow Sonnets' the references are drawn directly from the city, its history and the present; and in the Science Fiction poems the themes relate to actual human ambitions and actions, with analogies to actual experience, but carried into other spheres—'imaginative poetry exploring time and space'…. The poems are memorable as plots and occasionally as rhythms, but phrases and lines seldom stay in the mind, except from the lyrics. Morgan is...
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