Morgan, Edwin George 1920-
Scottish poet and critic

Born in Glasgow, he was educated at Glasgow University and served in the Royal Army Medical Corps during World War II, an option he chose as a conscientious objector. He became assistant lecturer in English at Glasgow University (1947), rising to titular Professor of English (1975-80), now emeritus. He published his first volume of poems, The Vision of Cathkin Braes, and a translation of Beowulf, in 1952. His verse from the 1950s is introspective and rather gloomy, but his later work contains optimism, and by the time of A Second Life (1968), he had embraced his homosexuality. An incomplete Collected Poems was published in 1990, followed by a collection of his influential essays and critical writings, Crossing The Border (1990). A skilled translator, he collected his translations of various writers, such as Boris Pasternak, Alexander Pushkin and Federico Garc�a Lorca, in Rites of Passage (1976). His adaptation of Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac into demotic Glaswegian in 1992 was highly acclaimed.

Bibliography: R Fulton, Contemporary Scottish Poetry (1974)