Table Of ContentHugh MacDiarmid:
The Poetry of Self
Christopher Grieve, writing under the name of Hugh MacDiarmid,
was a major modern poet and founder of the Scottish Literary
Renaissance. In this study of his poetry, John Baglow eliminates what
has been a stumbling block for most MacDiarmid scholars by showing
the very real thematic and psychological consistency which underlies
MacDiarmid's work. He demonstrates the extent to which MacDiar-
mid's work was dominated by a desire to find a faith that could justify
his desire to write poetry, a desire which was continually thwarted by a
critical intellect which inevitably destroyed whatever faith he was
able to construct. This constant search without a successful conclusion
is at the heart of the work of major modernist writers; MacDiarmid's
poetry can be seen as embracing this tradition and making it explicit.
Baglow shows that this search for justification was a focus for
MacDiarmid almost from the start, but that only with the develop-
ment of "synthetic Scots" did he begin to grapple with it directly.
While at first the idea of a Scottish essence seemed to promise the
spiritual foundation MacDiarmid was seeking, as his poetry devel-
oped this idea became less important and he came to see poetry, and
ultimately the language of poetry itself, as unrealizable ideals.
This reading of MacDiarmid's poetry and its relation to the
modernist movement will be of value to readers of MacDiarmid as
well as to readers more generally interested in twentieth-century
literature.
John Baglow is currently employed by the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council in Ottawa.
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Hugh MacDiarmid
The Poetry of Self
JOHN BAGLOW
McGill-Queen's University Press
Kingston and Montreal
McGill-Queen's University Press 1987
ISBN 0-7735-057 1-7
Legal deposit 3rd quarter 1987
Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec
Printed in Canada
oo
Printed on acid-free paper
This book has been published with the help of a
grant from the Canadian Federation for the
Humanities, using funds provided by the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Baglow, John
Hugh MacDiarmid, the poetry of self
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-7735-0571-7
i. MacDiarmid, Hugh, 1892—1978 — Criticism and
interpretation. I. Title.
PR6013.R7352561987 821'.912 087-093457-0
Cover photograph Hugh MacDiarmid.
Courtesy Michael Grieve
For Robert Lloyd Baglow
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Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
1 Introduction: Hugh MacDiarmid and
His Age 3
2 The Early Lyrics: The World and
the Self 26
3 Uncouth Dilemmas 64
4 The Poetry of Particulars 100
5 Speaking in Tongues: The Final
Statements 151
6 Conclusion: The Problems of the
Modern Poet 185
Appendix: MacDiarmid and His Critics 213
Glossary 221
Notes 223
Bibliography 235
Index of Poems by Hugh MacDiarmid 243
General Index 247
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Preface
It is regrettable that the late Christoper Murray Grieve ("Hugh
MacDiarmid"), who fought all his life for the principle that Scotland
must take its place among the international community of cultures,
died so little known outside his native land. As he himself knew,
Scottish literature, in the popular mind, is Rabbie Burns and drunken
sentimentalism, quaint language and earthy primitivism: a vestigial
phenomenon at best. Even those familiar with the achievements of
the Great Makars such as Dunbar and Henrysoun may well still refer
to them as "Scottish Chaucerians." And some of those who have
glanced at Grieve's work have perhaps been tempted to see in it
simply a valiant but foredoomed attempt on his part to overcome his
own suffocatingly parochial tradition - they "kent his faither," so to
speak. To come to his poetry appreciatively means to surmount a
legacy of condescension which has stifled the aesthetic life of many
another culture — English Canada's, for one.
It must be said that Grieve never makes it easy. Early work, written
in an enriched, synthetic Scots language which one must take the
trouble to learn, gives way to vast verbal artifacts in English,
ponderous, obscure in intent, vocabulary, and reference, a seemingly
deliberate turning away from "what poetry is all about." Few besides
his admirers in the Scottish Literary Renaissance (which he founded)
and in the social realist school of literary criticism have bothered to
take the plunge. And those who have tend to share one failing in
particular: they, to differing degrees, take Grieve's ideas and philoso-
phizing altogether too seriously in themselves, and by so doing have
missed the real significance of his writing.
This book is an attempt to present Grieve's work in a context which
transcends both his explicit, fierce nationalism, and his maverick
association with communism. In so doing, I hope to demonstrate his
