HUGH MACDIARMID IN HIS CONTEXT

Abstract

WHAT HAVE THE CONSEQUENCES of the Union of 1707 proved to be? What has Scotland become, culturally, nationally, psychologically? Is there a viable Scottish identity available to nourish the artist and to provide a vantage point from which to look out on the world? How is Scotland's present related to her past and to her future? And what sort of Scottish future do we want anyway? If Scotsmen of intelligence and imagination have been asking these questions, and other questions of the same kind, more and more fiercely throughout the last forty years, Hugh MacDiarmid must take a considerable share of the responsibility. His work for a Scottish Renaissance was not simply a literary endeavour: it was bound up with questions of Scottish identity which had for the most part been slumbering for nearly two centuries when he came upon the scene. And not only with questions of Scottish identity, for the question of the quality of modern industrial democratic society, which prevails over the whole western world, is also involved. The Anglicization of Scotland is part of the general Gleichschaltung of all western culture, and an investigation of its nature and causes is therefore bound up with social and political—and economic—ideas. Arguments about the use of Lallans or the relative merits of Burns and Dunbar or the place of Gaelic in Scottish culture could not therefore, in the context of any adequately conceived Scottish Renaissance movement, be merely arguments about a literary trend or skirmishes preliminary to the emergence of something parallel to the Pre‐Raphaelite movement or the publishing of the Yellow Book. They were in the last resort not only about the meaning of culture, of nationality, or history: they were, to put it quite simply, about the meaning of life. And that is what Hugh MacDiarmid's poems are about.

Citation

Daiches, D. (1965), "HUGH MACDIARMID IN HIS CONTEXT", Library Review, Vol. 20 No. 1, pp. 4-7. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb012415