Edwin Morgan

Edwin Morgan is Scotland's major living poet, and Inventions of Modernity is the first book-length study of his work. Since the 1940s Morgan's poetry has been carving out an alternative to the conventional evolutions from Modernism to Postmodernism, creating instead a substantial body of writing that ranges from the sublime to the hilarious. Instinctively at odds with the literary politics of the Pound-Eliot axis that remained influential deep into the twentieth century, Morgan develops instead a radical and libertarian poetics in an encyclopaedia of forms; from Anglo-Saxon metre through sonnet-sequences to concrete poems, and including gay poetry, science fiction verse and prize-winning translations into both English and Scots from numerous languages. Because his inventive and often transgressive practices were ahead of their time his poetry now seems to elaborate many of the theories that have followed him into print. From his early attraction to Apocalype poetry, to his continuing engagement with the liberating potential of Surrealist forms, and including his more recent work for the theatre, this book traces the various movements that Morgan has used (and refused) over a long life of writing. It will be of interest to students, teachers and academic researchers involved with strategies of reading, with cultural studies, with the politics of literary history and with gay and transgressive writing.