Soaring ideas, intellect, vision and passion
Edwin Morgan, Scotland’s first modern Makar or poet laureate, was born in Glasgow in April 1920. Next month, to mark his centenary, publishers Polygon are releasing a series of new collections of his poems, each one organised by theme and introduced by a
The universe science has revealed simply swallows that older revelation’s world, and world-view, whole
‘Bold Braithwaite Morgan’ – it sounds like a pirate, or a firm of solicitors. It’s the subtitle of Penguin Modern Poets 15, which in 1969 introduced the work of Edwin Morgan (alongside Alan Bold and Edward Braithwaite) to a wider readership. That wider readership included me. A space-age schoolboy determined to become a scientist, I had two literary passions: science fiction and poetry.
Poetry was respectable. Science fiction was not. Encountering them in one place was a shock: of recognition, of delight, of vindication. “Archives” and “The Computer’s First Christmas Card” hinted at a science-fictional sensibility. “A View of Things” held out a secret handshake:
“What I love about poetry is its ion engine”
You had to have read science fiction to know about ion engines! Only then could you grasp the line’s metaphor: a tiny continuous thrust that can’t lift you off Earth but can shift your orbit and, by mere persistence, take you a long way – to anywhere, in time. This suspicion was confirmed by “In Sobieski’s Shield” and “From the Domain of Arnheim.” These poems were indeed science fiction, and not just any science fiction. Not your respectable science fiction, your Penguin Modern Classics Nineteen Eighty-four or Brave New World , or even The Day of the Triffids, your science-fiction-for-people-whodon’t-like-science-fiction. No, this was the pure quill, the hard stuff: pulp SF, Golden Age SF! The sort of science fiction you had to hide the covers of at home.
Many years later, on a visit to record Edwin Morgan’s welcome to the 2005 World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow, I asked him whether he read science fiction.
Oh yes, he said, he found it stimulated the imagination. In his youth it had been frowned on, and he’d had to hide the covers of Astounding and Amazing Stories when he smuggled them into the house.
Other poets, of course, have written science fiction and space poetry. Few have taken it as seriously and unapologetically as Morgan, as an exercise of imagination valid on its own terms. Time travel, space travel, matter transmission across light-years, surviving the death of the Sun . . . all are taken literally, and their human consequences unravelled.
Morgan was likewise surefooted with science fiction taken metaphorically. “The First Men on Mercury” wouldn’t work its spell for any other planet, and especially not for any planet ever taken seriously as a possible abode of life. “The First Men on Mars”? “The First Men on Venus”? Aw, come on . . . You see the problem. It’s the impossibility (well, let’s hedge our bets and say the extreme improbability) of intelligent, articulate life on Mercury that frees us to read the poem on its many other levels beyond our “little plastic model / of the solar system, with working parts.”