Hugh 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. This page intentionally left blank 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 This page intentionally left blank 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 This page intentionally left blank 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