From Slate to Jupiter: Poetic Patterns of Edwin Morgan's Sonnets from Scotland

This paper seeks to investigate a Scottish response to the European tradition of the sonnet in the poems of Edwin Morgan in his Sonnets from Scotland. A close study of various poems allows the establishment of the extent to which Morgan's sonnets deviate from the Petrarchan/ Shakespearian patterns not only in their formal arrangement but also in their content. The sonnet's thematic variety, the arrangement of space and time, the construction of the poetic persona show that Morgan's cycle is public rather than private, metapoetic rather than lyrical, hybridlike rather than canonical.