Intertextual Imprints of Edwin Morgan’s Sonnets from Scotland

Abstract

The paper postulates that Morgan’s cycle is a particularly appropriate object of intertextual study as his poetry is rich with textual correspondences and cultural inter-relationships. Morgan’s formal method of composition emulates in its intertextual propensity the general theme of the sequence: a multidimensional peregrination through space and time of Scotland’s history and geography in search of its national identity. The intertextual correspondences in Morgan’s Sonnets from Scotland are predominantly language-oriented or aesthetic. Morgan enhances the meaning of his sonnets with linguistic coloring which covers the whole spectrum of languages and their registers from slang and local Glaswegian dialects through modern languages like German, French or Arabic, to ancient Latin, Greek or even extinct Pictish. The second dominant variable which qualifies the senses of the entire cycle is broadly understood art, both in its verbal as well as visual form of representation. Synergic cross-fertilization of these dominant connotative fields of signification allows Morgan to create sonnets of unsurpassed dexterity in modern British poetry.