Reading the city: Edwin Morgan’s “Glasgow Sonnets” as a contemporary urban sonnet sequence
Abstract
This essay is an analytical study of a ten-poem sequence of sonnets written by Morgan in the seventies of the twentieth century. In it the late Scottish Makar creates a sophisticated poetic map of the city’s dynamic architectonic and sociological mutations by means of sophisticated language patterns. The poetic strategies used by Morgan in this cycle of sonnets aim at rendering the social and political problems of a modern city through equally advanced and amorphous linguistic operations. A detailed analysis and interpretation of all ten sonnets creates a poetic map of Glasgow with its characteristic and randomly chosen places, populated by people who find it difficult to accommodate there. Morgan’s sequence of sonnets becomes a refined and compound structure which, while relying on traditional motifs and patterns of Renaissance sonnets, transforms most of them and creates their modern unconventional lyrical equivalents.
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