Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
All I know is is that Hugh MacDiarmid (born Christopher Murray Grieve) is one of the best known Scottish poets of the 20th century – although I think he was seen as a local poet, mainly, due to his focus on Scottish language and Scottish nationalism. He was highly political, as most oppressed people are – and was determined to restore the Scottish tradition (its language and rhythms), after being battered down by British domination. Similar to the Irish Revival going on at the very same time, in the early years of the 20th century, with Gaelic Leagues popping up, and a real effort made to restore the Irish language, Hugh MacDiarmid took it as his mission to revive the Scottish language, its pride and separateness. He was a man of his convictions, a communist and nationalist, and abhorred any half-measures, seeing them as the cowardly cop-outs that they so often are. He writes from a place of titanic anger.
I don’t know much about him, but I do know that (like Joyce, another writer-in-exile-in-his-own-country), he looked to “the continent” for his inspiration (as well as in his own nation), finding kindred spirits in the French Symbolists and all those decadent guys like Mallarme, et al. He said that he felt it was his mission to be a “cat-fish that vitalizes the other torpid denizens of the aquarium”. English is obviously the language of Shakespeare and Milton and Keats, but it was not the native language for those in Ireland, Wales and Scotland – and it was an explosive issue, highly political. Their languages had been systematically discouraged and snuffed out. So much of 20th century literature is from former colonies of the British Empire, world-wide, finding their legs again, their voice, their own traditions. Much of that stuff is terrible, granted – I find most modern poetry of this kind basically unreadable and unmemorable. Identity-politics and nationalism do not necessarily make great poetry. But MacDiarmid’s stuff is rich and funny and when seen in the context of the time – quite courageous. Now, it might seem quaint. Or a throwback. Like a sign that says “Candy Shoppe”, or some other ridiculous archaism. But no. This is political poetry, even if politics is never mentioned. This is angry, raging stuff. Speaking in your “native tongue”, even if it was just to say “How are you this morning” was a political act. Remember the moment in James Joyce’s The Dead when Miss Ivors, the Irish nationalist, leaves the party, she calls out to the crowd, “Beannacht libh!” – a benign farewell statement, but seen as aggressive and almost hostile to that particular crowd, an indictment of their total acceptance of British domination. “I’M speaking Irish, because I AM Irish.” is her angry subtext.
MacDiarmid writes from that place. He had a lot of enemies, a lot of naysayers, whom he slayed left and right in prose, like William Wallace of yore. He loved a fight. He was Scottish, after all. He found most Scottish poetry to be unacceptable, and he wasn’t one of those people who just “does his own thing”. Most of these nationalistic poets, ones who live in an oppressed or dominated land, can’t just “do their own thing”. It needs to be a movement. Other poets must be encouraged to embrace their Scottishness, to look back to their roots, pre-British, and write from THERE.
Michael Schmidt in Lives of the Poets
Because many of MacDiarmid’s best poems are in a language heightened by his own invention (called Lallans, Synthetic Scots, or Vernacular Scots) based on the vernacular of the Borders and Scottish Lowlands, not on standard English, he seems at first as linguistically difficult as his forebears Dunbar and Douglas (he lacks the repose of Henryson).
MacDiarmid found Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to be a revolutionary work (as indeed it is), and thought it was an exciting example of the future. Language is a big BIG deal to MacDiarmid. As it was to Joyce. Perhaps someone born in England proper could not understand this. But Joyce was always aware that the language he spoke, the language he grew up speaking, had been IMPOSED on his people. It gives you a different relationship to language, there are fewer assumptions, fewer unexamined elements. MacDiarmid wrote a long poem for James Joyce called “In Memoriam James Joyce”, which was a celebration of Joyce’s supra-national, intra-national, extra-terrestrial, whatever you want to call it, relationship to language. An example to everyone.
Seamus Heaney writes of MacDiarmid:
The recorded words and expressions … stretch[ed] a trip wire in the path of Grieve’s auditory imagination so that he was pitched headlong into his linguistic unconscious, into a network of emotional and linguistic systems that had been in place since childhood.
He had some monstrous political views (thought Stalin was a great guy), although understandable seen from his perspective. He was listed in Who’s Who, naturally, and when asked to name his favorite recreation, he wrote: “Anglophobia”.
Michael Schmidt again writes (and he’s so good at providing connections, references, influences):
[MacDiarmid’s] was an inclusive talent like Lawrence’s or Whitman’s, only more austere and particular, more Presbyterian, less subjective. It is intellectual, satirical, deliberately inelegant, yet at the same time prophetic… Like another great Scot, Thomas Carlyle, he knew his own arrogance and could make fun of it. Hard on others, he could be hard on himself. The romantic and mystical impulses that trip up his materialist mission are part and parcel of his achievement and his shortcomings, all of which he exposed in In Memoriam James Joyce, particularly in the section that in extract is called “The Task”. The poem is filled with hostages to fortune. It calls his paradoxical, antinomian structures to account and finds them wonderfully wanting. Paradoxical choices are evident throughout, even in the choice of Scots, an act at once reactionary and revolutionary, articulating as it does against the broad complacent nationalism of Britain a narrow, redefining and positive nationalism of Scotland. MacDiarmid’s nationalism is not triumphalist or at any point complacent. Its intention is recuperative; he is wresting something out of the past and out of the present, an area of distinct identity, independent value. He explores this theme inexhaustibly in prose, not least in his richly eccentric study Scottish Eccentrics. Scots is not a regional dialect but the reconstruction of a national language. The project may be doomed, but it is heroic, and in making the new – or remaking the old – language, he creates some of the greatest poetry of the century.
I like to read his stuff out loud, especially the really Scottish-sounding ones, because – like with Chaucer, or Finnegans Wake – these things are meant to be heard. They LOOK nonsensical on the page, but once you open your mouth and start to muddle through, they make beautiful sense. You don’t even need a glossary.
T.S. Eliot wrote of MacDiarmid:
It will eventually be admitted that he has done … more for English poetry by committing some of his finest verse to Scots, than if he had elected to write exclusively in the Southern dialect.
Here are two of his poems – one is obviously written in a Scottish dialect, the other not. The second one is a great example of how Hugh MacDiarmid ARGUED with people through his writing. The second poem is a response to A.E. Housman’s poem “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries“. MacDiarmid couldn’t let it pass, had to respond. As you can tell from the first line, he never ever held his punches.
Cloudburst and Soaring Moon
Cloodburst an’ soarin’ mune
And ‘twixt the twa a taed
That loupit oot upon me
As doon the loan I gaed.
Noo I gang white an’ lanely
But hoo I’m wishin’, faith,
And clood aine mair cam’ owre me
Wi’ Jock the byreman’s braith.
Another Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries
It is a God-damned lie to say that these
Saved, or knew, anything worth any man’s pride.
They were professional murderers and they took
Their blood money and impious risks and died.
In spite of all their kind some elements of worth
With difficulty persist here and there on earth.
