Alan Morrison (poet)

Alan Duncan Morrison (born 18 July 1974, Brighton) is a British poet.

Morrison's Christian name was chosen after two of his father's boyhood heroes, Alan Breck, the Highland Jacobite fictionalized in Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Kidnapped, and, sans the second 'l', Allan Quatermain, from the novels by H. Rider Haggard. Morrison's early years were spent in Worthing, West Sussex. In 1985 his family moved to a small hamlet, Trematon, outside Saltash, in South-East Cornwall, just over the Tamar River from Plymouth. Due to unforeseen vicissitudes, several years of rurally isolated near-abject poverty followed, which had a profound influence on Morrison's development, personally, poetically and politically (he 'converted' to socialism at the height of Thatcherism). He was educated at English Martyrs Roman Catholic Primary School (1978–85), Saltash Comprehensive (1985–90), Plymouth College of Further Education (1991–94), and the University of Reading (1994–97) where he initially studied Sociology but later switched to Ancient History (graduating with what W.H. Auden termed "A Poet's Third" (Hons)). In 1998 Morrison moved to Brighton (his birthplace) where he cut his teeth in poetry while working for a number of years in various unrelated jobs and voluntary roles (including secretary, homelessness worker, mental health poetry tutor, freelance editor, designer, and occasional magazine journalist).

Morrison's work owes some debt to fairly unconventional influences such as Anglo-Scots poets John Davidson and Harold Monro, and Anglo-Welsh poets Alun Lewis and Dylan Thomas. However, his earliest influences were John Keats, Wilfred Owen, William Blake, Andrew Marvell, Emily Brontë (whose novel Wuthering Heights first inspired Morrison to write) and Percy Shelley (his introduction to the latter was via a stanza from 'The Mask of Anarchy' excerpted on the back of The Jam's 1980 LP Sound Affects -the lyrics of Paul Weller were also a potent influence on Morrison's early poetry, along with those of Kate Bush and Matt Johnson). Critics have frequently drawn comparisons between Morrison's often didactic and polemical style and a wide range of poets and writers such as John Milton ('Miltonic' has often been coined), William Blake, John Clare, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, W.H. Auden, Alun Lewis, Philip Larkin, Stevie Smith and Tony Harrison.

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