A tight and tidy copy of Edith Sitwell’s late WWII poetry collection belonging to the first Makar and showing, perhaps, his close attention to her long 1929 poem, ‘Gold Coast Customs,’ a “chant-like metrical experiment” and example of modernist primitivism, set between the British Protectorate of the Gold Coast of West Africa in 1875 and 1920s London.
By 1946 the Scottish poet and translator had resumed studying for his degree in French and Russian at Glasgow University, having served as a non-combatant conscientious objector with the Royal Army Medical Corps during WWII. His library, held by the Special Collections department at the Mitchell Library, Glasgow, shows that “Morgan’s interactions went beyond note-making in the margins, to cutting up books [shock, horror!], physically sampling material and pasting it into scrapbooks for reference and inspiration”: this copy seems to have got of lightly.
Sarah Hepworth (2015) ‘Edwin Morgan: cutting up and scribbling in books’, University of Glasgow Library Blog