Tag Archives: Hugh MacDiarmid

“Poetry in my opinion must be honest before anything else and I refuse to be ‘objective’ or clear-cut at the cost of honesty.” — Louis MacNeice

“Self-assertion more often than not is vulgar, but a live and vulgar dog who keeps on barking is better than a dead lion, however dignified.” — Louis MacNeice Born in Belfast on this day in 1907, Louis MacNeice went to … Continue reading

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“I did not begin to write poetry in earnest until the really emotional part of my life was over.” — poet A.E. Housman

OUCH, A.E. OUCH. He was born in 1859 and he died in 1936. That generation saw so much change it boggles the mind, and I say that as a member of a generation which grew up sans internet – who … Continue reading

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Happy Birthday, Wystan Hugh Auden: “The enlightenment driven away / The habit-forming pain”

W.H. Auden was born on this day in York, England, 1907. I first encountered Auden in my “Humanities” class, senior year in high school. I got a lot out of that class, and I remember we analyzed Auden’s famous most-anthologized … Continue reading

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“These English songs gravel me to death. I have not the command of the language that I have of my native tongue. In fact, I think that my ideas are more barren in English than in Scotch.” — Robert Burns, “the Ploughman Poet” of Scotland

“For my own part I never had the least thought or inclination of turning poet till I got once heartily in Love, and then Rhyme and Song were, in a manner, the spontaneous language of my heart.” — Robert Burns … Continue reading

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“[My function] in Scotland during the past twenty to thirty years [is] that of the cat-fish that vitalizes the other torpid denizens of the aquarium.” –Hugh MacDiarmid

The function, as it seems to me, O’ Poetry is to bring to be At lang, lang last that unity … — Hugh MacDiarmid, “A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle” It’s his birthday today. He was born on August … Continue reading

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