Edwin Morgan: A very modest magus

The old poet is sitting at his desk, his all-but-broken body crumpled, his white-haired head bowed. He can't hear very well, but hates to admit it. He can't write, or at least when he does, even he can hardly read what he's written. He can't move from his chair.

To his left, a window is open and a soft June breeze eases into his room at the Glasgow care home, carrying with it the sound of traffic, gears changing down for the Crow Road lights. He might look up occasionally at the red sandstone tenements across the road or at the flowers visitors have brought him: visitors who have signed in at reception ("Ah, so you're going to see the professor?"), walked down freshly decorated corridors, past the day's choice of lunch menu on the noticeboard, and the residents' lounge; who have noted with relief that this is not one of those places wafting with ammonia and madness, but a tolerable last home for the country's greatest poet.

Edwin Morgan is 88. He has set his sights on living to 90, and he's so stoically stubborn that he may well do so. When his doctor told him he'd got prostate cancer, he said he could have anything between six months and six years. "I'll have six years, please," said Morgan. That was nine years ago.

Yesterday, at the Borders Book Festival in Melrose, he was awarded the £25,000 Sundial Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year award, Scotland's most lucrative literary prize, for his most recent collection, A Book of Lives. It wasn't, the organisers stressed, a lifetime achievement award, but simply recognition that, in the words of SAC director of literature Gavin Wallace, "his work still has all the creative daring, energy, eclecticism and willingness to take risks of an 18-year-old".

Talk to other writers about Morgan, and their reactions range only between reverence and affection. To his publisher and friend, Hamish Whyte – he admits he might be biased – you have to go back to Burns to find a Scottish poet of similarly sweeping range and humanity.

Ali Smith, winner of the fiction category at yesterday's awards, praises Morgan's phenomenal intellect, lack of ego and mastery of form. "His is a deeply Scottish and at the same time world-ranging voice, one that ranges across gender, across borders. He is the most generous and unselfish writer, open to all selves, all languages, all literatures. His is a mind as big as the planet – no, as big as the universe. He can make any form work, do absolutely anything with any poem. He's the highest form-jumper we have – an incredibly important British poet and dramatist."

Physically, for the last four years, Morgan has been virtually confined to this single room. It's here where, in 2004, the then First Minister came to make him Scotland's Makar, or Poet Laureate. On one of the walls hangs a framed copy of the defiantly optimistic poem Morgan wrote and Liz Lochhead read at the opening of his nation's Parliament. When Scotland looks for its brightest face for the world, it is to the man in this room, this mild-mannered, multi-voiced magus, that it turns.

Magus? He'd cross out that word as too extravagant, and I'd normally agree. But this time I'll keep it in; it seems right for a poet who can imagine Loch Ness monsters singing, earthmen talking Martian or computers sending Christmas cards; who can unpick the heart's deepest secrets and hopes; who can draw Glasgow true to life and make a city's smallest moments universal. A poet whose latest book of flying sorcery sweeps across the universe from the Big Bang to 2300AD.

Another reason: this is a man whose mastery of language – Latin, Greek, Italian, French, German, Italian, Russian, Anglo-Saxon, Hungarian – eclipses most poets on the planet. "While other poets might rely on English translations to rework classics in other languages," says Hamish Whyte, "Eddie will never do that. Even with languages he mightn't speak – like Vietnamese – he'll immerse himself, dictionaries and grammar books to hand. For Gilgamesh, I remember seeing him at work with all these books – on cuneform, Babylonian, Acadian grammar – piled up around him."

I've met him three times, the first a couple of weeks after 9/11, in his book-lined Anniesland flat. We got to talking about the Second World War, when he'd worked in the Medical Corps in Egypt and Palestine. Just before I left, he told me he was writing a sequence of poems about famous people who have visited Glasgow. One of them would be Pelagius. What did I know about Pelagius? Only that he was a heretic, I replied. His eyes gave that famous Morgan twinkle – almost everyone who meets him notices it. Back in Edinburgh, I looked up Pelagius on the internet. A fourth-century Briton, it told me. An optimist about human nature who didn't believe in original sin. A man of great learning who had travelled to Egypt and Palestine. "By some it is suggested," the article concluded, "that his real name was Morgan."

I've thought of Morgan as a bit of a magus ever since. He could have told me about Pelagius, but that would have broken the spell. But in that story are two of the qualities I treasure about him – his erudition and his lack of ego. He's an altogether modest magus: not for him the joining of groups or leading of campaigns. True, he outed himself as gay at the age of 70, at the time of the Clause 28 debate about the teaching of homosexuality in schools, but the notion of being a soundbite-slick activist argumentatively touring the TV studios would have been anathema to him.

For one thing, it would have been too narrowing. His focus is far wider. On the Poetry Archive website on which he can be heard reading his poems, he selects his favourite quote: Shelley's dictum that "poets are the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present". He's not just at ease with that slippage of time across millennia: it is a root spring of his work. The here and now matters – he writes of his life's loves with irresistible tenderness – but he is almost always looking outwards, towards a wider humanity.

Take how he writes about cancer. The obvious path is towards the elegiac: the last blooming of flowers the poet will see, an awareness of the evanescence of beauty and of the body's own deadly blooms, all tied together with highly personal memories and, perhaps, a gentle nudge to posterity: I felt this, saw this, this was my life.

Yet in the nine years Morgan has had cancer, he has glided round the first person when writing about it. Instead, in his poem Gorgon and Beau, he gives us a dialogue between a cancer cell and a normal one. Although he does indeed show graphic scenes of suffering – a man on chemo retching in a cardboard bowl, a woman arriving on a ward too late to see her dying husband – they are subsumed in the millennia-long battle between the two cells.

Morgan's own cancer has eaten away at his lower spine and is only temporarily kept at bay by hormone injections into the tumour. The injections, deep into his stomach, are painful, but so great is the discomfort caused by the cancer that, in the last two or three weeks before a hormone injection "you'd take any kind of injection just to take away the pain".

That admission is a rare break from Morgan's normal stoical optimism. An optimist with cancer? "It's not your life," he once told me. "It's what you do with it that counts."

In Gorgon and Beau, he traces the cellular battle between the benign and malign back to the time of the dinosaurs. Discovering that dinosaurs suffered from cancer (the first full-scale survey was in 2003) allowed him a way in to the poem. The dinosaur's roar from his cancer-rotten "hirpling hip", he is saying, threads through time into the present, just as the grief of the wife mourning a husband lost to cancer is a 70-million-year howl back to the Cretaceous period. Ordinary poets wouldn't have that width of vision, nor, in their mid-eighties, interest in the latest research. A magus, or someone with a courageous lack of self-pity, just might.

From his room in the Glasgow care home, Morgan remains fascinated by developments in the world around him. He reads a newspaper daily and keeps abreast of the world of books through a shoal of literary magazines. There's one other clue about why he chose to write about the pain of the present through the prism of the long-dead past: in the pared-down, decluttered life of advanced old age, one of the few objects to survive Morgan's move from his Anniesland flat is a pale grey, fossilised dinosaur egg.

I visit him in that room with a friend who's known him for decades. He's a professor of English of whose erudition I am just as much in awe as he, in turn, is of Morgan's. We shouldn't stay too long, he warns. Perhaps we'll have only 20 minutes before the great man tires.

He turns the doorknob and we enter the room. Morgan is slumped in his chair, his back to us. I wonder whether he is asleep, or whether he is thinking about new poetry.

"The thing about Eddie," says Hamish Whyte, "is that he works in his head. He has an idea, lets it simmer, works out its complications and how best to handle it. Then he'll write it down very quickly and go over it. There's very little re-drafting, because he's already thought things through so carefully. Often poems come out intact." Although Morgan is unable to type them, this is sometimes done by Professor James McGonigal of Glasgow University, a regular visitor, who is writing Morgan's biography.

He turns his face towards us and smiles. He's just had a haircut, actually a very trendy one, with a sharp parting down the left and trimmed right back at the sides, and his beard tidied into a wispy goatee. I ask him if he's still writing poetry. The grey eyes look up, friendly but uncomprehending. At this stage I don't realise about his deafness, so I plough on with some convoluted question about whether his immobility affects the poetry he is writing. Then suddenly, he answers:

"I don't know if I am writing poetry. I'm writing some, but not very much, but I try to keep my hand in somehow. I've been writing some poems about dreams and nightmares. I never normally dream much. But I had an extraordinary spate of dreams at the end of last year, mainly nightmares. Very frightening, some of them.

"The body seems to want you to forget these things and I'd find it hard to remember them. But I want to get as close to the original as possible, so I try to force myself to remember the dream or nightmare and write it down. You have to do that very quickly, but I think I got them before they disappeared. There aren't too many poems of this kind – some, but not very many. I think most poets are suspicious of dreams."

Two years short of 90, and he's trying out new forms. One shouldn't be too surprised. Each decade seems to have given us a new Eddie Morgan, I say to him. The grey eyes smile back. I'm not sure he's heard, so I rush again into another question about which of his decades he looks back on with most affection.

"I'm not sure about that," he says. And of course he isn't. That way nostalgia lies, and Morgan doesn't do nostalgia. His poems are about reaching new planets, setting out on long voyages of discovery, going boldly into the future. "It's hard/to go let's go" says the teleported astronaut (he's writing this, remember, in 1964!) at the end of On Sobieski's Shield; in On the Way to Barnard's Star (2300AD), from the new collection, there's another new arrival on a new planet, another ending with a new beginning ("'Open the hatch', I said").

"Remembering your own life can be useful up to a point," he says, "but I don't think it's good to examine your life too closely. You know that famous statement, an unexamined life is not worth living. Well, I'm not sure about that." He gives a small laugh.

He doesn't re-read much, either. Not even his own poetry, I wonder? The books are lined up on the shelves to the right of his table – just a couple of yards away, although in Morgan's case tantalisingly out of reach. I ask which of his poems he'd most like to read at Melrose – or at least which collection he feels best represents his work. "The Second Life," he says. "I'd like to read from that."

For a while we make small talk. He's been on a trip on the Forth and Clyde Canal, he says, and that's a new first in his life. He doesn't mention about having been to see the Concorde at East Fortune Air Museum, but a friend has told me about that, about how the care home residents were impressed when he told them he'd flown on it. He mentions how he wishes he had persevered with Gaelic ("one of the great regrets in my life") and tells me about the Japanese prints on his wall.

We don't want to tire him, my friend and I. We don't want to outstay our welcome. So I say to Edwin Morgan what I know hundreds and thousands of people reading this would want to say to him. I am, I tell him, impressed by his fortitude and his optimism.

"That's just my temperament, how I write," he says. "I know people sometimes say, 'Surely you can't believe all this when your whole house of cards collapses.' I don't think like that at all. If you have that kind of forward-thinking mind then you probably search for signs of optimism. You see, most poets aren't like that. But you've got to write in the way that's true to you. I leave pessimism to the others."

Time to leave. I place my chair back against the wall. My friend carefully moves the poet's chair back so it and he both face the desk. To Morgan's left, the breeze gently wafts the lace window curtain.