Hugh MacDiarmid is both the most significant and also the most controversial figure of the Scottish Literary Renaissance, a movement which radically altered the landscape of Scottish writing in the first half of the twentieth century. As well as being a poet of startling innovation and vision, he was also a prolific cultural and political commentator, writing in journals, newspapers and magazines on a vast range of subject matter.
For many, his best work is to be found among his earliest poems, a group known as the 'early lyrics', which were published in two collections, Sangshaw (1925) and Penny Wheep (1926). Within Sangshaw is MacDiarmid's first Scots lyric poem, 'The Watergaw' (first published in 1922) as well as 'The Bonnie Broukit Bairn', 'Crowdieknowe' and 'The Eemis Stane', while Penny Wheep includes 'The Love-sick Lass', 'Empty Vessel' and 'Focherty'. In these short lyrics, MacDiarmid managed to fuse the language and rhythms of the oral ballads and sense of the older poetic traditions of Dunbar and Burns with an awareness of contemporary developments in modernist European literature, creating rich, symbolic poetry which heralded the reawakening of Scottish literature, and remains as fresh and vivid as at its first appearance.
In the years preceding the appearance of his Scots lyrics, MacDiarmid had begun to evolve a synthetic Scots gathered from many regional variants, and to reclaim archaic language which, once used by the Makars (Scotland's late medieval poets), had fallen from use. This undertaking was a response to what he saw as the linguistic anomaly that the primary language of Scottish literature had become English, a language which he believed could not adequately express the breadth and particularity of the Scottish psyche. This notion was central to the Scottish Renaissance and was shared by many writers of the day although one, Edwin Muir (who is also featured on this website), famously disagreed with MacDiarmid, preferring to accept the linguistic situation as it had developed through time, and continued to write in English, advocating its exclusive use in literature. The dispute between MacDiarmid and Muir went deep into their individual visions of a Scottish renaissance, and they were never reconciled after 1936.
MacDiarmid's use of language can, at first sight, be daunting to the casual reader, for example 'The Watergaw' with its opening line, 'Ae weet forenicht i' the yow-trummle', and his work is often accompanied by a glossary. Clarifying the meaning of 'watergaw' as a shimmering or indistinct rainbow, or the 'yow-trummle' as the spell of cold weather common in Scotland after the summer sheep-shearing, however, reinforces for the reader MacDiarmid's belief in Scots as capable of expression unattainable in English.
'The Watergaw' is an ambiguous lyric, with its cold imagery, 'yow-trummle' 'weet forenicht' and 'on-ding' (or 'downpour') and the suggestions of death as well as cold are present in the image of a smokeless chimney. Death (and atheism) are also evident in the speaker's chilling remembrance, 'An' I thocht o' the last wild look ye gied/Afore ye died'. Ultimately, the poem raises more questions than it answers and, while it has been interpreted as portraying the death of MacDiarmid's father, it remains essentially private in nature.
In many lyrics, such as 'The Bonnie Broukit Bairn', MacDiarmid's socialist politics come to the fore with the suggestion of the 'broukit' or neglected bairn as the earth, tilting in space, its plight ignored by the wealthy planets in their finery of 'crammasy', 'silk' and 'gowden feathers'. Furthermore, these are images which can also be read in relation to MacDiarmid's nationalist agenda, with the 'broukit bairn' representative of Scotland's suppressed and unfulfilled potential.
MacDiarmid followed his Scots lyrics with A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), a long dramatic monologue which is considered to be his finest extended work. The 'Drunk Man' is a complex poem and many editions exist, the best of which is Kenneth Buthlay's 1987 edition which provides extensive commentary and notes, leading the reader through MacDiarmid's often opaque use of language. Throughout the 2685 lines of the poem, the drunk man finds himself lying on a moonlit hillside staring at a thistle, which, jaggy yet beautiful, encapsulates the divided Scottish self. Through his inebriation, he considers his national flower, and, speaking aloud in a style close to the modernist 'stream-of-consciousness', muses on the fate of Scotland as nation, on the human condition, and through these, on his own concerns and fears. The depth and complexity of the drunk man's ruminations remind us of the phrase 'in vino veritas', a notion interpreted by MacDiarmid's protagonist with the line, 'there's nocht sae sober as a man blin' drunk' (277).
MacDiarmid's poetry from the 1930s onwards has received little critical attention in comparison to his early lyrics and the 'Drunk Man', although readers may find collections like To Circumjack Cencrastus (1930), First Hymn to Lenin and Other Poems (1931) and Scots Unbound (1932) a more accessible way of approaching his work.
In later years, MacDiarmid continued to write extensively, and became increasingly involved in Communism, a interest that is reflected in poetry such as Second Hymn to Lenin (1935) and the philosophical Stony Limits (1934).
Again in the shadow of his Scots lyrics is his later experimental work which includes In Memoriam James Joyce (1955) and The Kind of Poetry I Want (1961).
Finally, MacDiarmid also published a good deal of prose, of which you may be interested to look at Contemporary Scottish Studies (1926), a collection of essays; Scottish Scene or the Intelligent Man's Guide to Albyn (1934), which he wrote with Lewis Grassic Gibbon, and his magnificent, eccentric autobiography, Lucky Poet, which appeared in 1943.
