‘Transgressing into poetry’: nationality, gender, and sexuality in Sonnets from Scotland by Edwin Morgan (1984), and The Price of Stone by Richard Murphy (1985)

Both Scottish poet Edwin Morgan and (Anglo-)Irish poet Richard Murphy adopted complicated perspectives regarding their respective literary traditions, and both expressed these perspectives in terms of transgression. Murphy described the writing process behind his 50-sonnet sequence The Price of Stone (1985) as ‘Transgressing into Poetry’ in a series of notes published in Poetry Ireland Review (2012, 2013b), while Morgan titled a paper given at the ‘Non-Metropolitan Sexualities’ conference in Aberystwyth ‘Transgression in Glasgow: A Poet Coming to Terms’ (1997). For both poets, ‘transgression’ was something that they observed, investigated, and incorporated into their work – and their poetic ‘transgressions’ were formal, linguistic, political, gendered, and sexual.