Edwin Morgan is the most mercurial of poets, equally happy writing concrete poems, sonnet sequences or developing new forms that magically fit their occasions. He finds subject matter everywhere: a consideration of William Wallace might sit alongside a tribute to Jimi Hendrix’s performance at Woodstock; and the reader can expect to be addressed by an apple or Emperor Hirohito or Edith Piaf. Or Gertrude Stein on Venus. Morgan’s work is lit with a tireless curiosity: “Deplore what is to be deplored,/ and then find out the rest”. Since his first publication in 1952, Morgan has produced a dazzling river of poetry, and the judgment of his fellow poet Liz Lochhead has become proverbial: “There is nothing he couldn’t make a poem out of.”

I am on my way to meet Morgan, having won the poetry competition named after him. I am accompanied by the poet and academic David Kinloch, who organises the competition. Kinloch was taught by Morgan at Glasgow University and the two have been friends since. He sums up Morgan’s influence: “His experimentation and his translation work expanded my sense of what a poem can be. He believes in opening doors.”

Morgan’s artistic adventurousness is remarkable, but his strike rate is even more impressive. His experiments are not warm-ups or off-cuts but a vital part of his poetry. Nevertheless, the sheer variety of his oeuvre meant that critical approbation was a long time coming. Morgan would have found fame sooner had he limited himself to any one of his incarnations; instead, he was 48 when his breakthrough book appeared. The Second Life contains everything from cut-up newspaper headlines to tender love poems, such as the enduringly popular Strawberries:

let the sun beat

on our forgetfulness

one hour of all

the heat intense

and summer lightning

on the Kilpatrick hills

let the storm wash the plates

Even if it doesn’t silence them, prolonged neglect can inhibit a poet. How did Morgan’s poetry remain so open and generous? The answer seems to be that he is an incorrigible optimist: “I felt strongly it would all come right in the end, so I just kept working. There is a certain risk in writing in many different styles; but if I’d stuck to a single point of view, that wouldn’t be me. Gradually I built up a variety of styles, and a variety of ways of looking at the world, so there isn’t a typical Morgan poem. I think I won that particular battle.” He certainly did. Morgan is now Scotland’s best-loved poet. In 1999 he was made the Glasgow Poet Laureate; in 2000 he was given the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry; and in 2004 he was named Scotland’s first national poet, the Scots Makar. It has been a decade of celebrations.

The latest celebration took place earlier this year with the opening of the Edwin Morgan Archive in the Scottish Poetry Library. The archive, which contains all Morgan’s many publications, was collected by the publisher and poet Hamish Whyte over a 30-year period. “I first met Eddie in 1981 when I wanted to compile a bibliography of his work,” Whyte tells me. “He invited me around and, in his usual generous way, gave me complete access to his papers and books. I started collecting everything that I could get my hands on.”

Exploring the archive is like leafing through a photo album of 20th-century poetry: there are hundreds of newspaper clippings, magazines, anthologies and small press publications. Some are extremely rare: Sealwear, a pamphlet that Morgan made by hand in 1966, exists only in an edition of 14 copies. “I just love the variousness of Eddie’s poetry,” Whyte says. “He has a line — ‘Nothing is not giving messages’ — I think that is his credo.”

However, while Morgan’s work has gained greater recognition over the past ten years, his health has deteriorated. He is now confined to a nursing home in the West End of Glasgow, where I have come to visit him. With his impish smile, beard and piercing blue eyes, he has the air of a genial sage. His speech rhythms have a nervous energy, and I recognise the dancing cadences that give his lines their characteristic upbeat tempo. A City, for example, opens with: “ — What was all that then? — What? — That. — That was Glasgow.”

Glasgow. Morgan has always lived here, turning down a scholarship at Oxford and offers of employment in the US to take up a teaching post at Glasgow University. His explanation for this is typically diplomatic: “I had just come back after years in the Middle East with the Army, so I’d had enough travelling for a while.” He says that while he has chronicled the city he has also mythologised it: “I don’t mind being thought of as a Glasgow poet, but it doesn’t stop me from writing about a rocket to Mars. You need to have a base, but poetry must have imagination as well. I like to think the Glasgow in the poems is a transformed Glasgow, a bit like Alasdair Gray’s great book Lanark.”

As a young man Morgan considered pursuing a career as an artist, but settled on language as his medium. His university studies were interrupted when he was called up in 1939. “I didn’t want to be entirely apart from the war, but I didn’t want to be killing in it,” he says. He joined the Royal Medical Corps as a conscientious objector: “I received basic training, but I spent most of my time at my typewriter. I got to see all kinds of places: Egypt, Palestine . . .”

This early experience of travel confirmed Morgan’s curiosity about other cultures. He is a prolific translator and his Collected Translations makes a sizeable companion volume to his Collected Poems. “My first poem, which I wrote when I was about 14, was a comment on French poetry, and how different it was from English poetry,” he says. Even the poetry competition that carries his name is the Edwin Morgan International Poetry Competition. “Yes, that was my idea,” he says proudly.

“I haven’t written much since I got the cancer diagnosis,” he says. But this isn’t exactly true: he had a burst of creativity in the years after the diagnosis, writing many poems that rank with his best. Gorgo and Beau is a dialogue between a normal cell (Beau) and a cancer cell (Gorgo). In a triumph of artistic sympathy, Morgan gives many of the best lines to Gorgo, whose gleeful contempt for human suffering is strangely attractive: “Nothing is more boring than a well-made body.” More subtle responses to the diagnosis are found in Cathures, in a series of poems he wrote about everyday events: seeing a seagull or being splashed by a rain-drenched rhododendron bush. These poems are marvellously clear-eyed and direct, buttonholing the reader with their unexpected perspectives. Even cloud-watching, that most self-consciously “poetic” of activities, elicits a fresh response from Morgan: “Clouds — what did you ever do for me/ that I should spend one minute watching you?”

Perhaps his finest work from this period is the sequence Love and a Life, which crowns his most recent collection, A Book of Lives. One of the sections, After a Lecture, is a tribute to late love:

Last and most unexpected friend, do you know you overthrew me

In those first moments when you walked towards me in that lecture-room, not to undo me

But you did undo me, I was shaking, I felt that well-known spear go through me,

And when we talked my mind was racing like a computer to keep that contact sparking. What drew me

Was irreducible but recognisable — drythroat fragments, physical certainties, emanations and invasions so quick to imbue me

And wound me with hope I swore I would cope

With whatever late late lifeline this man, whom I knew I loved, picked up and threw me.

Although Morgan’s output has slowed, a new collection is planned for his 90th birthday next April. Dreams and Other Nightmares will be published by Mariscat, the small press run by Whyte. Morgan says that the new book “will be a gathering together of work ... but also some new poems inspired by a series of nightmares I had a few years ago. Quite strange and disturbing poems. I would probably have avoided writing about dreams in the past, but this time I thought I would try it.”

It is reassuring to know that Morgan, approaching his 90th year, still feels the allure of uncharted territory.

The Edwin Morgan International Poetry Competition is sponsored by the Faculty of Arts, University of Strathclyde. Details at vitalsynz.co.uk; Collected Poems, Collected Translations, Cathures and A Book of Lives are published by Carcanet; The Sinking Road by Paul Batchelor is published by Bloodaxe

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