Seamus Heaney pays tribute to Edwin Morgan

“For all that we knew Eddie had been nearing the end, it’s still a shock and sadness to hear that he has died.  His courage as a man and his constancy as a poet only seemed to increase with age.  I think the whole poetry community took a kind of pride in his ongoing fecundity, and it was good that he lived to know the honour and regard he was held in by his city and his country.  A solitary spirit who breathed solidarity, an experimentalist who did not disdain ‘accessibility’, his subject was the big one Patrick Kavanagh identified as ‘the parish and the universe’.  What I liked greatly about him was the way he combined a low key personal presence with a high level of poetic endeavour.”