Scottish literature holds a unique position among literatures in and around the English language -- a 400 year history in which it has passed back and forth between national and regional status, depending on the conditions of state politics and national culture. It is the original "other" literature of the English tradition, the oldest continuous practice of a tradition within the tradition. Its practice has been at times oppositional, at times collaborative, almost always conflicted. Its dialogic texts are exemplary and its ability to shape-shift according to a reader's point of view or desire can be downright dizzying. In its history, other writers who by choice or circumstance find themselves on the margins of literary empires may find a mirror, a map, and a damned good time.

Scottish literature entered the twentieth century at one of its lowest ebbs, but reached the twenty-first in a full-voiced, multi-voiced Renaissance. In keeping with the subject of this course--which excludes poetry in translation--the introduction which follows emphasizes poetry in only two of Scotland's three languages: Scots and English. (Sources for Gaelic poetry are included in the bibliography and the multi-lingual anthologies cited there will lead you to many individual Gaelic poets.) You will also find here a rather lengthy passage on Robert Burns and the 18th century. Bear with me: Burns' legacy is as important to Scottish poetry today as Whitman's and Dickinson's are to American.

Extant written poetry in what is now Scotland dates to the 6th century, with the Latin poetry of Irish monks on the island monastery of Iona. In the centuries following, about half a dozen languages were written and spoken in what is now Scotland. Oral Pictish literature has not been preserved, but Welsh, Old English, Northumbrian Anglo-Saxon (forerunner of Scots), Old Norse, and Old French each produced written poetry that has survived, while Gaelic poets continued an oral bardic tradition that dated from the 2nd century. By the early days of the modern Scottish nation, the 13th & 14th centuries, Scots was the literary tongue of the Lowlands, Gaelic of the Highlands. Since the late 17th century, most Scottish poets have written in English, but a counter-movement of Scots poetry and a small but vigorous and combative Gaelic tradition have kept lingustic and aesthetic choices both various and politically charged. 

Readers who think of “English” as one language will miss much of what is best in Scottish poetry. The
Scottish voice repossesses English, as Douglas Dunn has put it, passing it through an aural filter of the Scots vernacular until “a Scottish accent could be described as Scots stripped of its diction.” A parallel modification of the language can be observed in poets like Norman MacCaig and Iain Crichton Smith whose sensibilities were formed in part by Gaelic. In the tradition of Burns, other recent poets in English write of complex subjects in a rhythm and diction that hew close to the spoken demotic. Across other differences, these poets share an interest in the social history of words and in the problems of finding, or fashioning, a linguistic home. The juxtaposition of high and low diction, content, and tone, so characteristic of Scottish poetry, seems perpetually animated, figured, and intensified by issues of language itself. For some poets no idiom is entirely and exclusively natural--a position which has led some into the tempting gardens of postmodernism. 

In 1919, T.S. Eliot, then resident in England, wrote: “The first part of the history of Scottish literature is part of the history of English literature when English was several dialects; the second part is part of the history of English literature when English was two dialects--English and Scots; the third part is something quite different--it is the history of a provincial literature. And finally, there is no longer any tenable distinction to be drawn for the present day between the two literatures.” Note 1

Both his history and his philology were faulty, yet Eliot’s statement reflected the views of his day. Indeed, in 1948 Hamish Henderson would write: “In the first decade of this century Scotland presented a daunting spectacle of cultural ruin. To any observers it seemed unlikely that the country could much longer maintain even a facade of national identity. The English imperialist Ascendancy had consolidated itself, with the full acquiescence of the Scottish bourgeoisie, during the course of the nineteenth century, and its domination in academic circles was virtually complete. The indigenous traditions of the people, both Gaelic and Lallans [Lowland Scots], seemed to have been left tattered and defenceless before the big battalions of alien aggression.” Note 2 Henderson wrote of this condition in the past tense, of course, because by 1948 everything had changed.

20th century Scottish poetry had two founding fathers (and no founding mothers). Together, their
theory and practice established a debate that still governs and energizes much of Scottish poetry in
English and Scots. First, “Hugh MacDiarmid,” the pseudonym and “lofty intellectual superstructure of [the] alter ego” of Christopher Murray Grieve (Dunn xviii). It is an exaggeration to say MacDiarmid created the Modern Scottish Renaissance in poetry singlehandedly, but his influence was such that it is impossible to imagine Scottish poetry as it is today without him. Grieve came out of the British Army Medical Corps in 1919, having served in the First World War and having been exposed to the literature of Europe. As a Socialist, a nationalist, and an internationalist, he was utterly opposed both to domination by England’s language and to the cultivation of regionalism within that domination. What he wanted was not rediscovery of the past but invention of the present, a task he deemed impossible based on available models for the simple reason that under the domination by English Scots had ceased to evolve. No longer used for or exposed to changing intellectual life, it had few new words and had become, at best, a language of feeling rather than thought. It could not express the whole mind of a modern Scot, which was precisely what MacDiarmid wanted to do. Thus when he began to write in Scots he did not build directly on his predecessors (Louis Spence, Violet Jacob, Marion Angus, e.g., poets of the early 20th century who wrote in colloquial Scots), nor on Burns and Furgosson, both great poets of the eighteenth cenutyr, nor on the great 15th-century Makars. His statements about language did not look backwards, toward a lost past, but forward and outward, toward the aesthetic projects of international Modernism. In 1923 he wrote: 

We base our belief in the possibility of a great Scottish literary Renaissance, deriving its strength from the resources that lie latent and almost unsuspected in the Vernacular, upon the fact that the genius of our Vernacular enables us to secure with comparative ease the very effects and swift transitions which other literatures are for the most part unsuccessfully endeavouring to cultivate in languages that have a very different and inferior bias.

 The Vernacular is a vast unutilized mass of lapsed observation made by minds whose attitudes to experience and whose speculative and imaginative tendenceis were quite different from any possible to Englishmen and Anglicized Scots today. It is an ichoate
Marcel Proust - a Dostoevskian debris of ideas - an inexhaustible quarry of subtle and significant sound. (Quoted by Dunn xx)

“The Eemis Stane” is an oft-cited example of MacDiarmid’s early impact--a thoroughly modern image presented in archaic diction. Similarly, “Empty Vessel” presents a decidely 20th-century vision of the power of absence. These poems demonstrate the excitement of what Douglas Dunn has called “a
language in which old words are used in poetry with the force of neologisms, the shock of the unfamiliar.” (xx)  Note its difference from the demotic Scots of Burns or Garioch which balances between spoken and literary diction, laid on a colloquial meter. In MacDiarmid’s poems, lexical audacity is thematically linked not only to Scottishness but to Modernism. A poem’s recklessness, energy, and philological adventurism embody the poet’s fundamental belief in vigorous action--a belief many other poets saw as too individual and eccentric to provide a foundation for a new Scottish poetry. 

MacDiarmid gave up writing in synthetic Scots by the early 1940s and went on to produce major works in English and in a more colloquial Scots (including his greatest work, the book-length sequence A Drunk Man Looks at a Thistle), but he never gave up his belief in language itself as the material of thought. “On a Raised Beach” repeats in English some of the virtuoso performance of “Water Music,” while later English poems like “The World of Words” make explicit the lifelong themes of his work.

To say that MacDiarmid enjoyed argument would be one of the great understatements of literary history. He frequently and delibertely took positions that were not only contrary to those held by his peers but designed to enflame opinion. Among his more unpopular beliefs: that imagination hampers thought and prevents us from being attentive to reality; that a poet should cultivate a Nietzschean solitude and elitism; that anything popular is damaging to literature. His political beliefs also were extreme, anti-democratic, and marked by ill-will toward just about everybody. He was expelled from the Nationalist Party for being a communist, and from the Communist Party for being a nationalist, then rejoined the Communist Party after the USSR invaded Hungary in 1956--precisely when other
supporters were abandoning the cause. All these characteristics make him a difficult figure for younger poets to embrace, and yet each must reckon with him. As with Ezra Pound’s fascism and anti-Semiticism, MacDiarmid’s extremity can neither be detached from his poetry nor destroy its genius. His literary heirs must face both aspects of the man and of the heritage he provided. 

One means by which MacDiarmid's excesses may be somewhat domesticated is by contextualizing his public provocations within the Scottish tradition of flyting. Flyting, which translates (from Scots) literally as scolding, is a tradition of hyperbolic and satirical public argument between poets. In a flyting, poets traditionally attack each other's craftsmanship, character, knowledge, and sexual prowess in terms both extreme and artful. Flyting dates to the earliest records of court poetry in Scots and is believed to have evolved from similar practices among the Gaelic poets who for centuries made their livings by the patronage of kings and chiefs--notorious for their professional jealousies and viper tongues. One of Macdiarmid's most famous public exchanges was a series of letters now known as "the folksong flyting", exchanged with Hamish Henderson and other writers in the pages of Scottish newspapers. Flyting also provides a uniquely Scottish context for the very public battles the concrete poet Ian Hamilton Finlay has fought with both cultural and taxing authorities regarding the artistic, religious, and financial status of the garden temple at his farm, Little Sparta.

MacDiarmid’s nemesis (and the man I’m calling the second father of modern Scottish poetry) was
Edwin Muir, who in 1936 published the book length study Scott and Scotland: The Predicament of the Scottish Writer (reprinted Polygon, 1982), in which he traced the faults of Sir Walter Scott, as novelist, to the fact that he came of a nation that was not a nation, a community that was not a community. Muir then went on to decry as impossible a project such as MacDiarmid’s, to willfully remake what history has unmade: a living Scots literature. While part of his argument recapitulates expected centrist arguments about the necessity of a Scottish writer taking part in the traditions of English literature, he casts the debate in terms that go to the heart of a Scottish writer’s position. 

Every genuine literature, in other words, requires as its condition a means of expression capable of dealing with every thing the mind can think or the
imagination conceive. It must be a language for criticism as well as poetry, for abstract speculation as well as fact, and since we live in a scientific age, it must be a language for science as well. A language which can serve for one or two of those purposes but not for the others is, considered as a vehicle for literature, merely an anachronism. Scots has survived to our time as a language for simple poetry and the simpler kind of short story...; all its other uses have lapsed, and it expresses therefore only a fragment of the Scottish mind. One can go further than this, however, and assert that its very use is proof that the Scottish consciousness is divided. For, reduced to its simplest terms, this linguistic division means that Scotsmen feel in one language and think in another; that their emotions turn to the Scottish tongue, with all its associations of local sentiment, and their minds to a standard English which for them is almost bare of
associations other than those of the classroom. If Henryson and Dunbar had written prose they would have written in the same language as they used for poetry, for their minds were still whole; but Burns never thought of doing so, nor did Scott, nor did Stevenson, nor has any Scottish writer since. In an organic literature poety is always influencing prose, and prose poetry; and their interaction energizes them both. Scottish poetry exists in a vacuum; it neither acts on the rest of literature nor reacts to it; and consequently it has shrunk to the level of anonymous folk song. Hugh MacDiarmid has recently tried to revive it by impregnating it with all the contemporary influences of Europe one after another, and thus galvanize it into life by a series of violent shocks. In carrying out this experiment he has written some remarkable poery; but he has left Scottish verse very much where it was before. For the major forms of poetry rise from a collision between emotion and intellect on a plane where both meet on equal terms; and it can never come into existence where the poet feels in one language and thinks in another, even though he should subsequently translate his thoughts into the language of his feelings. Scots poetry can only be revived, that is to say, when Scotsmen begin to think naturally in Scots. The curse of Scottish literature is the lack of a whole language, which finally means the lack of a whole mind.

Still and all, there are poets for whom MacDiarmid might never have written, poets, for the most part, who continue the indigenous Scottish tradition of demotic verse built on spoken rhythms. This tradition dates from the 15th century, when a group of poets at the court of James IV known as "The Makars" --  Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, & Gavid Douglas, most famously -- developed early modern Scots into a literary instrument of subtle virtuosity. This Golden Age was cut short by the death of James IV at Flodden in 1513, followed shortly by the Reformation's attack on the secular arts. The union of the crowns and removal of the court to London in 1603 put an end to court patronage in Scotland. The 18th century saw the so-called union of parliaments (actually the dissolution of the Scottish Parliament and submission of government to the English parliament), followed by the Jacobite rebellions of 1719 and 1745. Scottish culture was bitterly suppressed after the '45, particularly markers of Highland culture such as the bagpipe, kilt, and Gaelic language--the use of any one of which became a criminal offense. Though not criminally proscribed, the Scots language was, by Burns’ day, relegated to second-class status: school and university instruction was in English, educated Scots Anglicized their names, and the term Scots Literature (despite a history as long as the English) was deemed an oxymoron.

No substantial resistance  emerged until  the 18th century, when Allan Ramsay's collections of Scottish songs (The Tea-Table Miscellany, first editon 1763) and of his own poems in Scots initiated a rebellion against English-language domination. The master poet of the resistance was Robert Furgusson, who published, among other works, "To the Principal Professors of the University of St. Andrews on their superb treat to Dr. Samuel Johnson," a lexical masterpiece directed at the great English poet and dictionary-maker, still celebrated in his own tradition as a proponent and shaper of standard English. 

Most famous of the vernacular poets, though, is Robert Burns, who carried the mantle of linguistic nationalism after Furgusson's death. Like most poets who earn the title “national bard” Robert Burns displayed a breadth of interests and abilities, allowing admirers of varying aesthetics, temperaments and politics to identify with his work and shape their own “Robert Burns”-- love poet, libertine, satirist, teller of tales, egalitarian, nature poet, innovator, preserver of tradition, spokesman of the working class, technical virtuoso. His complexity is important today because it allows poets of widely different tendencies to find in him a historical claim to Scottishness and tradition.

As a self-educated farmer, Burns occupied an uncomfortably marginal position in the world of letters, one which he learned to exploit with a rare level of sophistication. Notice in the poems how the content of the poem claims humility, marginality, a lack of great ambition, while the form is sheer
sophistication, as complicated and difficult as any in English. The joke is at the expense of those who fail to notice the irony. Even when he wasn’t overtly claiming his peasant humility, Burns tended to write about small, powerless, vulnerable things and people--mice, lovers, poor farmers--embodying the fragility of his world in complex stanza forms that paradoxically demonstrate empowerment and control. This peculiar expression of the power of the marginal at times emerged as openly threatening, in poems about gypsies, outcasts, witches, and Jacobites, but more often it was a conflicted position, “the demotic ceremonial,” in Douglas Dunn’s words. 

He is the great poet of the canon of the disadvantageous beginning, middle, and end, and his metric, his resonance, his irony, the forms he used, are intimate and expressive aspects of his struggle with himself and his society. Note 3

...Burns is a poet of the virtues of excess, the comforts of going over the
score, the satisfactions of plain speaking and, indeed, the solace of
outspokenness....[His temperament] demanded forms in which propulsion
was of the very essence. [68-69]

To invent or perfect a poetic stanza is the equivalent of inventing a
musical instrument or of being among its instigating virtuosi. Very few
invent a significant or acceptable noise, and not many poets invent a stanza
which enters the repertoire and is named after them... It is possible to think
of stanzas, metre, rhyme, and the whole business of versification and
prosody, as visions--but of the ear and mind and not of the eye. To use the
old idea of verse as ‘numbers,’ then perhaps we can hear these stanzas (so
obviously devised for spokenness as they are) as audible arithmetic, and,
in Burns’ case, as local and national arithmetic, peculiarly audible. [68?]

Much of the pleasure of [this stanza] derives from the flow of a speaking voice riding over the obstacles of rapidly-disclosed rhyme and line lengths... Performance, that is, lies in the audible presence of a voice, the sustained inventiveness of rhyme, and an
adroit, resourceful handling of a stanza, the sustained shape of which is sculpted out of air so that it can be felt on the ear.

As you read Burns, note too the yoking together of spoken Scots and a sometimes quite highbrow English. (I mean, what is "timorous" doing with that "wee, sleeket, cowran beastie?") Some have observed disapprovingly that while Burns often translated materials from the folk tradition into an English idiom, he never performed the reverse. Nonetheless, by means of his genuine sensitivity to both idioms and traditions, Burns bequeathed to our times a heritage not of opposition between demotic and high art but one of integration and mutual enjoyment. This is underscored by the fact that despite both critical and commercial success with his poems Burns turned increasingly to songwriting and to the collection and revision of traditional songs and airs--which was, in fact, his sole literary occupation by the time of his premature death in 1796. Note 6 

Burns' efforts in this line were part of a broadly felt desire during his time to record what was regarded as the ancient and vanishing tradition of orally-transmitted folk song, particularly the ballad. Besides Ramsay's volumes, important collections were assembled by Sir Walter Scott and by Thomas Percy in London. Other collectors, working in the early 19th century, transcribed ballads from singers middle-aged and older who had learned them in their youth. Thus, though some of the  Scottish ballads are much older, their forms and genres as we know them today are largely a product of 18th century singers, scholars, and poets. Burns did not concern himself with ballads as much as he did with other song genres, but like most collectors of his day he routinely "improved" texts that came his way. Unlike most collectors, though, Burns was a poet of exceptional talent, so in his case perhaps the quotation marks can be omitted.

The 19th century was not a triumph in Scottish poetry. A dehistoricized sentimentalism dominated addresses to the nation, while grandiloquent Victorian diction sat poorly on traditional Scots sensibilities. In such conditions, the tools used so brilliantly by Burns--localism and a simple diction--degenerated into so-called “kailyard” (cabbage patch) poetry, described later by Hugh
MacDiarmid as “an apparently bottomless abyss of doggerel, moralistic rubbish, mawkish sentimentality and witless jocosity.” Note 7 By the century’s end, a preoccupation with the Italian Renaissance and with pre-Rafaelite sentiments produced poetry of more literary interest, but kept literary talents at a distance from their own time and place. In 1800, 17% of Scots lived in cities; by 1900 50% lived there. Crawford & Imlah have said: “The malaise of Scottish poetry in the nineteenth century was its general incapacity to register this shift in the national condition, to engage with the facts of the place and times it was made in.” The great city of this industrial explosion, Glasgow (at that time the second-largest city in Britain), became in literature synonymous with industrial Hell. 

In parallel with poetry’s development in America, this void of both taste and talent would add even greater intensity to the modern revolution when it finally came. Still, among the many were the few: poets who grappled with social and linguistic issues that would inform the more vigorous poetry of the 20th century, including the bitterness of the Highland clearances, the blight of industrialization, and the need to find a viable poetic idiom within and among the languages of the nation. From those seeds, rejected by MacDiarmid, grew the early 20th century poets of demotic Scots and English--including (from your reading list) William Soutar, Robert Garioch, and Norman MacCaig.

This generation of women poets includes several archetypes known only too well to feminist literary
historians: Rachel Annand Taylor, a consciously female poet whose inability to place her sensibilities firmly in her own time and place “robbed The Scottish Renaissance of one whose true place should have been at its head” -- in MacDiarmid's words; Violet Jacob and Marion Angus, who couched a potentially subversive portrayal of female discontent in a soft, unthreatening vernacular; Helen Cruickshank, whose services to male modernist poets stand in the place of whatever greater work she might have achieved as a poet; and Olive Fraser, who spent much of her life in mental illness, but wrote, in lucid times, with a modern intensity that dwarfs most of her contemporaries. Women poets have thus far shown little interest in the large and universalizing stances their male counterparts tend to take among these subjects. Their search for a serviceable poetic self tends to remain rooted in contingency, in the daily and the personal. Yet here, again, the drama of Scotland’s polyphony makes of both subject and language a different, and notably Scottish, beast. 

In the few weeks we have to devote to Scottish poets we'll concentrate on three themes: language, "Scottishness," and the modern city. Our introductory readings will introduce you to some of the  20th century poets mentioned above and to a few contemporary poets writing in Scots and English. Poems by Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman MacCaig, Edwin Morgan, Robert Crawford, and Kathleen Jamie will be featured. We'll then look at work by Tom Leonard, who embodies his sense of the city of Glasgow and of working class identity in the spoken language, and contrast this embodiment with other poems "about" Glasgow working class life. In our last set of readings we'll tackle David Kinloch and W.N. Herbert, two younger poets who, among other aspects of their work, have taken up the mantle of "dictionary Scots." We'll concentrate on Herbrert's short lyrics and some of his funny poems. In Kinloch's work we'll consider how he uses his "literary" and "artificial" language as a sounding intrument -- a very Scottish one -- to navigate some of the most intimate and difficult areas of life -- love, sex, and grief.

2 "Flower and Iron of the Truth." Henderson is a poet, critic, song writer, field collector of folksong & story, and a founder & former director of The School of Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh.  Return to text

3Douglas Dunn, "'A Very Scottish Kind of Dash’ Burns’ Native Metric," in Crawford's Robert Burns and Cultural Authority p74 Return to text

4 The Burns stanza (known more properly in Scotland as the Standard Habbie, after an influential poem of the 17th century) is an iambic tetrameter sestet with two lines of dimeter and only two rhyme sounds. Tetrameter is the dominant line of Scottish poetry so there is from the outset a national stamp about the form--no tetrameter stanza so complicated and culturally significant exists in the English tradition. Here is the basic form--

4 a / 4 a / 4 a / 2 b / 4 a / 2 b

Working with only two rhymes per stanza requires some virtuosity and--essential to this form--a healthy irreverence toward rhyme and diction. The short lines give it an odd little flip, and the form overall is well-suited to recitation. The form is clearly audible, hence delightfully anticipated in each stanza, so the audience can feel included in the fun even as it relishes the poet’s dexterity. This is all the more emphasized as each stanza is generally a single sentence, with 40-46 syllables (depending on the use of masculine or feminine rhymes). Dunn calls it “the triumphant pursuit of an awkward
stanza shape.” [65]  Oh go ahead, try it! It's easy! Return to text

5 This combination of sensibilities often arises where an audience is familiar with both oral and written traditions. A comparable sensibility can be observed in some African-American poetry.  Return to text

6Compare Wordsworth, who was influenced by Burns but afflicted by the English tradition of separating the high and low arts: his real speech of real men never comes near Burns'. In fact, some aspects of English Romanticism can be read in retrospect (not in its practioners' intentions) as the co-option by a literary establishment of the genuine arts of "real men" -- folksong, folk tale, and the 18th century entry of working men and women into literacy and the art of poetry. Return to text

7 Quoted by Crawford & Imlah. Return to the text
 

With the exception of Burns, I have not included volumes by individual poets. 

Burns, Robert. Poems and Songs of Robert Burns. Harvard Classics, Harvard UP, editions of 1909-1914. Representative Books on Line. http://www.bartleby, com/6/indexl.html

Crawford, Robert. Identifying Poets: Self and Territory in Twentieth-Century Poetry. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993.

Crawford, Robert. Devolving English Literature. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992.

Crawford, Robert & Mick Imlah. The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse, London: Penguin 2000.

Dunn, Douglas. The Faber Book of 20th Century Scottish Poetry. London: Faber, 1992.

Glen, Duncan, ed. Twenty of the Best. Galliard, 1990. [Young Scottish poets.]

Kerrigan, Catherine, ed. An Anthology of Scottish Women Poets (with Gaelic translations by Meg
Bateman). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991.

Kidd, Helen. “Writing Near the Fault Line: Scottish Women Poets and the Topography of Tongues,” in
Kicking Daffodils: Twentieth-Century Women Poets. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997. [This collection also includes an essay on Jackie Kay’s “The Adoption Papers” and one on radical content in British women poets using (relatively) traditional forms.]

Leonard, Tom. “The Locust Tree in Flower, and why it had difficulty flowering in Britain,” Intimate
Voices: Selected Work 1965-1983. Vintage 1995 [1984]

MacNeill, Kevin and Alan Finlay. Wish I Was Here: A Scottish multicultural anthology. Edinburgh: Pocket Books, 2000.

McMillan, Dorothy. “Twentieth-Century Poetry I: Rachel Annand Taylor to Veronica Forrest-Thomson,”
and “Twentieth-Century Poetry II: The Last Twenty-Five Years,” both in A History of Scottish Women’s Writing, edited by Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997. 

O’Rourke, Daniel. Dream State: The New Scottish Poets. Polygon, 1994. [A new edition is due out in
Autumn 2001.]

Thomson, Derick. Introduction to Gaelic Poetry. London: Victor Gallanz, 1974.