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“... mention, for instance, of those quarrels with younger writers such as Ian Hamilton Finlay, and the Edwin Morgan who is in some ways MacDiarmid’s literary heir. It does seem untrue to say that ‘as for MacDiarmid’s legacy, it has to be confined to his own achievement.’ MacDiarmid’s legacy seems present even in the work of those who were still ...”

“... we make our unfresh starts And share our instant chronicles. It’s your turn now. Edwin Morgan takes his turn with some flamboyance. His poems imagine things you wouldn’t think it necessary to imagine except to demonstrate what the mind can do, given half a chance. Imagine your flat is burgled, the burglar has cut his hand breaking the ...”

“... Fergusson’ are interspersed with poems on him by, among others, Kathleen Jamie, Edwin Morgan and Les Murray. This is an elegant echo of Ruddiman’s Weekly Magazine, in which many of Fergusson’s poems first appeared, and where verse was juxtaposed with essays, articles and correspondence. Fergusson is much admired by other poets ...”

“... of the desert war in the work of such Scottish poets as George Campbell Hay, Hamish Henderson and Edwin Morgan. There is a pained, grim quality to some of MacLean’s verse – seen in the impulse which leads him to translate the first 26 lines of Paradise Lost into Gaelic, appending after the last line (‘And justify the ways of God to men’) the date ...”

“... I was born before the Industrial Revolution,’ Edwin Muir wrote in The Story and the Fable (1940),and am now about two hundred years old. But I have skipped a hundred and fifty of them. I was really born in 1737, and till I was fourteen no time-accidents happened to me. Then in 1751 I set out from Orkney for Glasgow ...”

“... Not that he couldn’t do other voices. A bit like his more experimental contemporary, the late Edwin Morgan, another poet whose work catches the 1960s and 1970s splendidly, Porter enjoyed making poems that were consciously artificial – constructed – in their voicing. The best known of these is ‘Your Attention Please’, written in the flat tones ...”

“... nomen (‘I do not mean Hugh MacDiarmid’). Other Scottish writers were touchy subjects too: Edwin Morgan (‘Yeddie’) was a figure of suspicion, hitching a ride on the concrete bandwagon while blackening Finlay’s name as an ‘impossible’ person to the BBC and the Arts Council, though when Morgan proposed ...”

“... judgments, and means that if you scratched his back, he was under no obligation to scratch yours: Edwin Morgan, Robert Garioch and Ian Hamilton Finlay are three Scottish poets whose work he dismisses where he might have been expected, if only for tactical reasons, to approve it. It is the same with Scottish literature of the past. MacDiarmid is almost ...”

“... of modern Scottish culture has been the ease with which it is able to make the transition, in Edwin Morgan’s terms, from Glasgow to Saturn. What MacDiarmid wrote is the poetry of Very Large Array. Acutely, Davie relates the Drunk Man’s intellectual and sexual relationship with Jean to the comparative method of moving beyond the limitations of ...”

“... each poem will justify – or not justify – its individual language. A new accent is added by Edwin Morgan, himself a distinguished poet, whether writing in English, Scots or Computerese. He argues that though the language of Glasgow is traditionally condemned as an ‘impoverished and bastardised Scots’, it is in fact ‘the rural dialects of ...”

“... margin, is far from being a stranger to mainstream anthologies, while Basil Bunting, Dylan Thomas, Edwin Morgan, R.S. Thomas, Iain Crichton Smith, Thom Gunn, Hugh MacDiarmid and Norman MacCaig are unassailably part of our consciousness of the poetic landscape. Auden and MacNeice, too, though the omission in both books of Stephen Spender suggests that he ...”

“... ICA. And there were the writers: the Themersons courted J.B. Priestley but he failed to deliver; Edwin Morgan had his poetry rejected; Italo Calvino called in on the couple; B.S. Johnson invited Stefan to the Writers’ Co-Operative. The correspondence file bulges in surprising places, in large part thanks to Stefan’s habit of sending comp copies to ...”

“... did it partly under the auspices of Eliot’s poem. What The Waste Land showed, he explained to Edwin Morgan, was the way a long poem can create a ‘massive montage of one … theme upon another’. Graham really had only two preoccupations, Morgan wrote in a review of the Collected Poems: one was ‘trying to ...”

“... pieces in it are so troubled, as all Pound criticism has to be. The book’s keynote essay is by Edwin Morgan, who recounts how he spent World War Two ‘sitting in a flyblown tent in the Egyptian desert, waiting for the advance of Axis guns’, and who ‘from that time on ... could never see Pound in an unambiguous light, or think of him as other than ...”

“... to anglophone readers and collects the work of many translators who use a variety of techniques (Edwin Morgan translates Mayakovsky into Scots: ‘Een/gawp oot/fae a sonsy bap-face’). Political poems, manifestos and lectures that are usually ignored in the West are included here. The result is a fuller view of the poet struggling to reconcile his gift ...”