Celts
[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 and knowledge into his poetry, Morgan seems to me to stand out almost unchallenged as a poet of ideas.
In case I seem to be saying that Morgan is a poet like Auden, let me add at once that he has nothing like the same gift for the felicitous phrase and is altogether a heavier, more viscous writer. He resembles Auden only insofar as the two of them are natural intellectuals. (p. 75)
Morgan, for his part, is a poet of amplitude. He is interested in so many things, the beam of his vision flashes round so widely, that he needs space to work in. People who like neat, epigrammatic poetry will not often like his longer poems, where a certain torrential eloquence, even at the risk of saying the same thing in too many ways, is his chosen manner. An example would be 'The Cape of Good Hope', a poem from the mid-fifties, which takes the metaphor of a sea-voyage (I suppose, an actual voyage to South Africa which the poet made, perhaps during the war) and uses it as a framework for the poet's reaching out to life through his art, and for man's reaching out generally. It is, like most of Morgan's poetry, personal and discursive at the same time: a poem about himself and his own situation but always with that window open on the world, both the natural world and what man has made of life in that world. So we get powerful, even prodigal, descriptions of the unrestrained mighty force of the ocean itself, and also a section consisting of verse essays on certain speculative thinkers and artists who have engaged Morgan's attention—Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Newton, Beethoven, Melville, Mayakovsky. The purely descriptive passages, evoking the vastness and uncontrollability of the sea, remind one that the young Morgan was a contemporary of Dylan Thomas … and also that he must have come under some of the same influences as a fellow-Scot like W. S. Graham, though the voice I hear most strongly behind Morgan's is that of Hart Crane. Pitting his gift for words against the sea's immensity, Morgan pulls out all the stops in some splendidly uninhibited writing…. (p. 76)
A poet as wide-ranging as Morgan, as keen to try his hand at every new thing that comes up, will inevitably have times when he goes beyond the range of the individual reader. Personally I don't get much out of the science-fiction poems, though some of them are witty; and the long poem 'The New Divan' was just too much for me, I sank under its weight. But there was still an enormous amount that interested and held me. I think, after establishing preliminary agreement that Morgan is an energetic, interesting and valuable poet, the setting up of an order of preference becomes very much a matter of individual choice. (pp. 76-7)
Because Morgan is an ambitious poet, in agreeable contrast to those hedge-hoppers who stay entirely within their range, he is rewarded now and then with the power to break through his own barriers. For instance, he has, on the whole, not a very good ear; one rarely finds a line, let alone a whole poem, that has much lyrical quality. But because he does not give up, does not cease trying to write a lyrical poem, he is now and then rewarded by achieving one. (p. 77)
Most of Morgan's poems use very loose form—looser as the years go by and the collective literary mind forgets poetic form more and more completely—but he has kept himself alive to the possibilities of form, the advantages that can come from an ability to master it, and the result can be seen in the excellent 'Glasgow Sonnets' (1973), where the tightness and elegance of the sonnet form is itself an ironic comment on the disordered, sprawling dilapidation of the city.
In his variety, range, restlessness of mind and large output, the poet Morgan most reminds me of is Browning, and I intend that as a compliment. Browning's stock is not very high these days, compared with what it was in his own time, and yet he is not in danger of being forgotten; and neither, if people still know a good thing when they see one, is Edwin Morgan. (pp. 77-8)
John Wain, "Celts," in London Magazine, Vol. 23, No. 4, July, 1983, pp. 74-8.∗
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