April 27, 1920

Edwin Morgan (April 27, 1920 to August 17, 2010) was, in effect, as of 2004, the poet laureate of Scotland.

The Guardian in a long, thoughtful article, says:

Born in Glasgow, Edwin Morgan was expected to join the family shipping business, but began writing love poems instead. He served in the second world war, taught himself Russian and drew inspiration from the Beats. Acknowledged as Scotland's foremost living writer, he was ....named as the country's first poet laureate....

Morgan's.... until his retirement in 1980, ...was professor of English at Glasgow university; he led a secretive existence as a homosexual before coming out at 70; he is the author of a large body of cerebral poetry, and translations from several languages, including Russian and Hungarian. Yet one of Morgan's poetic identities is as Scotland's, if not Britain's, best comic performer in verse.....

"Morgan's poetry comes at you from every conceivable corner of time and space and in every imaginable mode," says Colin Nicholson, professor of English at Edinburgh and author of a study of Morgan's work, Inventions of Modernity (2002). "To use his own phrase, no matter where we look in the universe there is 'nothing not giving messages'. Everything in his imagined cosmos is capable of speech: Rousseau's ghost, the devil at Auschwitz and Percy Shelley. Mao's cat speaks, so does a crack in glass."....

Morgan left over 900,000 pounds to the Scottish National Party on his death.