Aspects of Form and Genre in the Poetry of Edwin Morgan

Edwin Morgan was born in 1920 in Glasgow and studied at Glasgow University where he later taught literature. He is much admired for his experimental writings, his ‘social’ poems, as well as for the diversity of his output.

The present book comprises a chapter on Morgan’s early vision poems (which have received scant critical attention hitherto); two on his hodoiporika, The Cape of Good Hope and The New Divan; a chapter on his deployment of the grotesque mode, centred chiefly on the Instamatic Poems and The Whittrick; another on his adaptations of the elegy, in which Edgecombe propose a new genre called the “thanasimon;” and, finally, an examination of his various monologic poems, read in terms of his avowed enterprise of “voicing” the universe. The study is topped by a prologue that sets out the consistency of Morgan’s vision over time, and tailed by an epilogue that connects his various critical pronouncements to his remarkably diverse output.