Galoshin rose and sang his song/You'll never keep me down for long!"

Edwin Morgan, 1920-2010, was, in the words Stephanie Byng used about Jeeves, the specific dream rabbit, and if that seems an odd choice of encomium I doubt he would have minded, for his reading was not only encyclopaedic but eclectic and he loved all things good of their kind. "Edwin Morgan has always been interested in many different areas" as his website rather inadequately puts it; actually he was the twentieth century's closest approach to Renaissance Man, and his poetry was characterised above all by a determination to boldly go in all sorts of directions. He never, all his long life, stopped being inventive and experimental; when in 2002, I reviewed his collection Cathures, it seemed impossible it could be by a man in his eighties; if you didn't know that, and if he hadn't made the odd reference to his years, you would never have guessed, for the questing, busy, mischievous mind was that of a man half his age.

He was a lovely man, with no side at all, very approachable at readings, but above all an absolutely towering intellect and talent. I was half hoping he might turn out to be immortal, like Galoshin, the folk-play character in the vein of John Barleycorn who cannot be killed and whom he references in Cathures. But since he wasn't, I'll remember his words on "Sunset":

to me
A burning coat of hope. I see
The harmless flames, walk into them.
The last light hardens to a gem.

More of his poems here, here and recordings here And a good interview here