The Effects of Beat Writers and Experimental Poetry on Edwin Morgans Work :: Edwin Morgan Poetry Beat Writers Essays

The Effects of Beat Writers and Experimental Poetry on Edwin Morgan's Work Discussing influences that in some way or other cause an author to change his work usually presents some difficulties, for example, why do we think a particular influence more important than another, and which one do we choose when there are many different ones? In Edwin Morgan's case there are quite a number of influences, all of them worth discussing: There are authors he translated like Vladimir Mayakovsky, Francesco Petrarca, Sà ¡ndor Weà ¶res, Eugenio Montale, Andrei Voznesensky, Attila Jà ³zsef, and others; there are also William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, G.M. Hopkins and John Milton, and there is the philosophy of Bakhtin and Wittgenstein. However, in this paper I will concentrate on the effect that the Beat writers and experimental poetry had on Morgan's work; "effect", because these have caused a greater change than any of the other influences. Beat poets and experimental poetry functioned as catalysts for Morgan's work, because they set processes going that changed hi s writing to a great extent. Borrowed from chemistry the term "catalyst" refers to any substance that causes and/or increases the rate of a reaction without itself being consumed after the process has been completed. And this is just what happened when Morgan discovered the Beatniks and experimental poetry. Before analysing the effects of these two catalysts on Edwin Morgan's work, we must take a look at the poetry he wrote before discovering them. Therefore I invite you to my time-travelling laboratory: First we will stop by to take a sample and to analyse our ground substance at the beginning of the 1950s in the form of two poems, 'The Cape of Good Hope' (1955) and 'The Vision of Cathkin Braes' (1952). We will then fly over to America to examine the Beat Catalyst, and come back to Glasgow around about 1960 to see if the Beat catalyst caused or increased any reactions; naturally, possible reactions will have to be documented. However, we cannot stay too long, as we have to fly to Brazil and to Switzerland to gather the other catalyst, a truly experimental one. After our return we will again check if any reactions have been caused or increased. We will then document these, check if there have been any additional reactions or perhaps if some long-term reactions have been caused, write a protocol, wash the test tubes, and set the mice free.