Edwin Morgan Quotes

Deplore what is to be deplored/
And then find out the rest

Don't let your work and hope be other than great.

When I go in I want it bright,/ I want to catch whatever is there/ in full sight.

I think of poetry as partly an instrument of exploration, like a spaceship, into new fields of feeling or experience (or old fields which become new in new contexts and environments).

Let the storm wash the plates.

I think I feel that the whole world is able to express something, so that when I write about the hyena or the heron or the timber-wolf it is just as far as possible trying to get into the life of these creatures, not to stand outside and look at them, as a man might see them, but also to feel along their lives.

I don’t think the future of poetry is all that black. I think it will be possible to write long poems again. The space age will perhaps bring a kind of epic poetry back. When poets get up into space, I don’t think they’ll be able to express the immensity of their experience in a six-line lyric.

Because, I suppose, so much of my work has been about something that’s in the process of change and I like, I think, even the idea of change more than I like the idea of tradition.

I, Morgan, whom the Romans call Pelagius
Am back in my own place, my green Cathures
By the frisky firth of salmon, by the open sea
Not far, place of my name, at the end of things
As it must seem.

This is not the delicate nightmare
you carry to the point of fear
and wake from, it is life, the sweat
is real, the wrestling under a bush
is real, the dirty starless river
is the real Clyde...

And leave him simply the great true recorder’,
not seeking order, or the measured disorder
of chaos theory, but pressing every border,

scouring, tracing, probing and extending
whatever tries to tell him it’s an ending,
breaking whatever tells him it’s unbending.

Sometimes poetry does have ulterior motives.