Edwin Morgan’s Orientations

This paper examines the formal considerations that preoccupied the poet Edwin Morgan during the 1970s in the lead-up to the writing of the sequence Sonnets from Scotland in 1984. Drawing on explorations of Morgan’s typescripts and manuscripts held in Glasgow University Library and on theories of queer phenomenology, it proposes much closer links between the writing of this sonnet sequence and the long poem ‘The New Divan’ (1977). These links are determined partly by Morgan’s interest in poetry’s visual dimensions and by the ways memory functions in both of these works. The ekphrastic character of both works is stressed and his concern with the visual appearance of his poems is noted as a major unifying factor in his aesthetic.