Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-vdxz6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T19:39:07.628Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

12 - Hugh MacDiarmid and the Scottish Renaissance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2013

Gerard Carruthers
Affiliation:
University of Glasgow
Liam McIlvanney
Affiliation:
University of Otago, New Zealand
Get access

Summary

Though commonly viewed as definitively rural and nationalist, the Scottish Literary Renaissance was actually begun in London by an émigré community of Burnsian Scots. The Vernacular Circle of the London Robert Burns Club, set up in 1920 to save the Doric from oblivion, boasted John Buchan and Violet Jacob as honorary members. Christopher Murray Grieve (‘Hugh MacDiarmid’) was an initial sceptic, objecting in formalist tones that ‘Mere patriotism is a Caliban’s Guide to letters.’ In the early 1920s, Grieve thought any revival of the Scots vernacular could only invite cultural inferiorism and further marginalisation and was glad to be one of the movement’s ‘most indefatigably helpful enemies’. Grieve disliked what he perceived as the Kailyard inflection in the Scots poems of Charles Murray (1864–1941), whose Hamewith (1900; 1909) was enormously popular, particularly in Murray’s native north-east. Born in Alford, Aberdeenshire, Murray emigrated to South Africa in 1888 to manage a gold-mining company, rising to be Secretary of Public Works in the Transvaal. Murray’s Doric poems are often infused with an exilic sentimentality for ‘Scotland our Mither’. Character sketches of rural Aberdeenshire life, such as ‘The Whistle’ and ‘Dockens Afore His Peers’, link him tonally to William Alexander’s Johnny Gibb of Gushetneuk (1871), but also to Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song (1932). Grieve included Murray in his journal Northern Numbers (1920–2) but later turned on him, along with other established figures such as J. M. Barrie and Neil Munro, in the Scottish Educational Journal, accusing Murray and the Doric revival of exemplifying ‘mental parochialism, a constitutional incomprehension and hatred of culture’.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Grieve, C. M., letter, Aberdeen Free Press, 27 January 1922; repr. in Alan Bold (ed.), The Letters of Hugh MacDiarmid (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984), p. 754Google Scholar
Grieve, C. M., ‘Leaves from a London Diary’, Scots Pictorial (1923); repr. in Angus Calder, Glen Murray and Alan Riach (eds.), The Raucle Tongue: Hitherto Uncollected Prose, volume i, 1911–1926 (Manchester: Carcanet, 1996), p. 45
Grieve, C. M., letter, Scottish Educational Journal (24 July 1925); repr. in Hugh MacDiarmid, Contemporary Scottish Studies, ed. Alan Riach (Manchester: Carcanet, 1995)Google Scholar
Bold, Alan, MacDiarmid: Christopher Murray Grieve: A Critical Biography (London: John Murray, 1988)Google Scholar
MacDiarmid, Hugh, Complete Poems, vol. i, ed. Michael Grieve and Alan Riach (Manchester: Carcanet, 1993), p. 17Google Scholar
Grieve, C. M., ‘Mannigfaltig: Beyond Meaning’, New Age (1924); repr. in Calder, Murray and Riach (eds.), Raucle Tongue, vol. i, p. 165
Grieve, C. M., ‘Causerie: A Theory of Scots Letters’, Scottish Chapbook, 1:7 (February 1923), 182–4Google Scholar
Grieve, C. M., ‘Edwin Muir’, Scottish Educational Journal (September 1925)
Grieve, C. M., ‘The New Movement in Vernacular Poetry: Lewis Spence; Marion Angus’, Scottish Educational Journal (November 1925)
Milton, Colin, ‘Modern Poetry in Scots before MacDiarmid’, in Cairns Craig (ed.), The History of Scottish Literature, vol. iv, Twentieth Century (Aberdeen University Press, 1987), pp. 11–36Google Scholar
Grieve, C. M., Albyn: or Scotland and the Future (1927)
MacDiarmid, Hugh, Albyn: Shorter Books and Monographs, ed. Alan Riach (Manchester: Carcanet, 1996), p. 14Google Scholar
Kiberd, Declan, Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living (London: Faber, 2009), p. 22Google Scholar
Gunn, Neil M., Whisky and Scotland (1935)
Linklater, Eric, The Lion and the Unicorn (1935)
MacClure, Victor, Scotland’s Inner Man (1935)
Power, William, Literature and Oatmeal (1935)
Mackenzie, Compton, Catholicism and Scotland (1936)
Neill, A. S., Is Scotland Educated? (1936)
Muir, Edwin, Scott and Scotland (1936)
Muir, Willa, Mrs Grundy in Scotland (1936). MacDiarmid’s Red Scotland: What Lenin Has Meant to Scotland was suppressed
MacDiarmid, Hugh, ‘Author’s Note’ (1926), A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, ed. Kenneth Buthlay (Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1987), p. 196Google Scholar
Joyce, James, Ulysses, Annotated Students’ Edition by Declan Kiberd (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p. 622Google Scholar
Kerrigan, Catherine, (ed.), The Hugh MacDiarmid–George Ogilvie Letters (Aberdeen University Press, 1988), p. 125Google Scholar
McCleery, Alistair (ed.), Landscape and Light: Essays by Neil M. Gunn (Aberdeen University Press, 1987)Google Scholar
MacDiarmid, Hugh, ‘The Caledonian Antisyzygy and the Gaelic Idea’, Modern Scot 2:2 (July 1931), 141−54, and Modern Scot 2:4 (January 1932), 333−7Google Scholar
MacDiarmid, Hugh, ‘Plea for a Scottish Fascism’, repr. in Hugh MacDiarmid, Selected Prose, ed. Alan Riach (Manchester: Carcanet, 1992), pp. 34–8Google Scholar
Lyall, Scott, ‘“The Man is a Menace”: MacDiarmid and Military Intelligence’, Scottish Studies Review 8:1 (2007), 37–52Google Scholar
Morgan, Edwin, ‘James Joyce and Hugh MacDiarmid’, in Crossing the Border: Essays on Scottish Literature (Manchester: Carcanet, 1990), p. 169Google Scholar
Shklovsky, Viktor, ‘Art as Technique’ (1916)
Rivkin, Julie and Ryan, Michael (eds.), Literary Theory: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 17–23
Gibbon, Lewis Grassic, ‘Literary Lights’, in Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Hugh MacDiarmid, Scottish Scene or The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Albyn (London: Jarrolds, 1934); repr. in Valentina Bold (ed.), Smeddum: A Lewis Grassic Gibbon Anthology (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2001), pp. 123–37Google Scholar
Unsigned editorial, ‘The Red Scotland Thesis: Forward to the John Maclean Line’, Voice of Scotland (June/August 1938)
Calder, Angus, Murray, Glen and Riach, Alan (eds.), The Raucle Tongue: Hitherto Uncollected Prose, volume iii, 1937–1978 (Manchester: Carcanet, 1998), pp. 9–14
MacDiarmid, Hugh, ‘The Kind of Poetry I Want’ (1961), in Complete Poems, vol. ii, ed. Michael Grieve and W. R. Aitken (Manchester: Carcanet, 1994), p. 1025Google Scholar
Snow, C. P., The Two Cultures (1959; Cambridge University Press, 2009)Google Scholar
MacCaig, Norman, ‘Patriot’, in The Poems of Norman MacCaig, ed. Ewen McCaig (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2005), p. 510Google Scholar
MacDiarmid, Hugh, ‘Scottish Poetry, 1923–1953’, Lines Review (January 1954)
MacDiarmid, Hugh, Lucky Poet: A Self-Study in Literature and Political Ideas, being the Autobiography of Hugh MacDiarmid (Christopher Murray Grieve), ed. Alan Riach (Manchester: Carcanet, 1994), p. xiiGoogle Scholar
Carruthers, Gerard, Goldie, David and Renfrew, Alistair (eds.), Beyond Scotland: New Contexts for Twentieth-Century Scottish Literature (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004)
Herbert, W. N., To Circumjack MacDiarmid: The Poetry and Prose of Hugh MacDiarmid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992)Google Scholar
Lyall, Scott, Hugh MacDiarmid’s Poetry and Politics of Place: Imagining a Scottish Republic (Edinburgh University Press, 2006)Google Scholar
Lyall, Scott and McCulloch, Margery Palmer (eds.), The Edinburgh Companion to Hugh MacDiarmid (Edinburgh University Press, 2011)
McCulloch, Margery Palmer, Scottish Modernism and Its Contexts 1918–1959: Literature, National Identity and Cultural Exchange (Edinburgh University Press, 2009)Google Scholar
McCulloch, Margery Palmer (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism: Literature and Society in Scotland 1918–1939, Source Documents for the Scottish Renaissance (Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 2004)
Riach, Alan, Hugh MacDiarmid’s Epic Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 1991)Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×