George Morgan

George Morgan 1743-1810, American merchant, Indian agent, and land speculator, b. Philadelphia. In 1765 he went as his firm's representative to engage in the fur trade in Illinois, but the venture failed. Morgan, interested in a tract of land (2,862 sq mi/6,565 sq km in what is now West Virginia) that had been ceded by the Native Americans in repayment for property destroyed in Pontiac's War (1763), helped to form (1776) the Indiana Company, with a land office at Fort Pitt. The state of Virginia successfully contested the company's claim after several years of litigation. In the American Revolution, Morgan served as an Indian agent and as a colonel in the commissary until 1779, when he retired to his estate near Princeton, N.J. In 1789 he entered into a scheme with the Spanish minister to the United States for colonizing Spanish territory and established (1789) the colony of New Madrid in what is now Missouri. The project was opposed by the Spanish governor of Louisiana, and Morgan abandoned it. In 1796 he took up scientific agriculture on a large tract of land he inherited in W Pennsylvania.

Bibliography: See biography by M. Savelle (1932).

Morgan, [George] Frederick (1922–2004),New York City‐born poet, after graduation from Princeton became a founder and the editor of The Hudson Review. His first volume, A Book of Change (1972), is frequently autobiographical in its quest for values, while Poems of the Two Worlds (1977) deals with body and spirit, the mundane and the ideal. Later works are The Tarot of Cornelius Agrippa (1978), a prose poem of legendry; Death Mother (1979) and Northbook (1982), collections of shorter poems; The Fountain and Other Fables (1985), allegories in prose; and Poems: New and Selected (1987).

Morgan, Edwin (George) (1920– ), Scottish poet and translator, educated at the University of Glasgow and professor of English there from 1975. He has published several volumes of poetry, from The Vision of Cathkin Braes (1952) onwards, in which he mingles traditional forms with experimental and concrete poems; many of his poems, such as Glasgow Sonnets (1972), evoke Scottish urban landscape. Other volumes include Sonnets from Scotland (1984), From the Video Box (1986), Collected Poems (1990), and You: Anti-War Poetry (1991). He has also translated the poetry of Montale, Mayakovsky, and Neruda, adapted Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac into Glaswegian demotic (1992), and set poems to music by jazz musician Tommy Smith (Beasts of Scotland, 1996; Planet Wave, 1997; and Monte Cristo, 1998).