Hugh MacDiarmid’s ‘On Raised Beach’: ‘Geopoetics’ in a Time of Catastrophic Crisis’

The poet Hugh MacDiarmid (1892–1978) was the major driving force behind the twentieth-century Scottish literary renaissance and was also a passionate Scottish nationalist. His poem ‘On a Raised Beach’ (1934) has been understood in theological and philosophical terms as a metaphysical exploration, albeit one grounded in an immediate experience of nature that took place on Shetland. In this paper, MacDiarmid’s epic is placed in the context of the present environmental crisis and the ongoing consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. ‘On a Raised Beach’ can now be re-located within the hermeneutical tradition of ‘Geopoetics’, a Scottish genre that is articulated and asserted by the poet Kenneth White (1938–). Whilst, however, White draws upon the highly contested and polyvalent concept of ‘shamanism’ in elaborating his standpoint, we shall argue that it is also appropriate to look for affinities between this dynamic poem and the ethos and mysticism of ‘deep ecology’, a perspective that invokes the equally contested mythology of ‘Gaia’.

SCOTTISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE: FROM HUGH MACDIARMID TO TOM LEONARD, EDWIN MORGAN AND JAMES ROBERTSON

The paper deals with the Scottish literary revival that occurred in the 1920s and 1930s. The leading theoretical and artistic figure of this movement was Hugh MacDiarmid, a Scottish poet whose main preoccupation was the role of Scots and Gaelic in shaping modern Scottish identity. Also called the Lallans revival – the term Lallans (Lowlands) having been used by Robert Burns to refer solely to the notion of language, the movement’s main postulates included the strengthened cultural liaisons between Scots and Gaelic (and not Scots and English as was the case until then). In the preface to his influential anthology of Scottish poetry, The Golden Treasury of Scottish Verse (1941), MacDiarmid bluntly stated that the prime aim of Scottish Literary Renaissance was to recharge Scots as a stage in the breakaway from English so that Scottish Gaelic heritage could properly be recaptured and developed. Relying primarily on MacDiarmid’s theoretical insights, it is our purpose to track, explore and describe the Scottish Literary Renaissance’s contemporary echoes. The paper thus focuses on the comparative analysis of Hugh MacDiarmid’s poetry, on the one hand, and the poetry of its contemporary Scottish creative disciples (Tom Leonard, Edwin Morgan and James Robertson). By comparing and contrasting the selected poems of the aforementioned poets, the main goal of the paper is to emphasize the validity, relevance and actuality of MacDiarmid’s movement for the present moment in Scotland.

Scottish Literature, Nationalism and the First World War

This chapter considers the Great War’s bearing on the rise of Scottish nationalism in political and cultural terms. Riach discusses these developments in the contexts of international imperialism, the Irish rising in Dublin, and most centrally in the Scottish literature of the era. Riach points to the international nature of Scottish literature in the pre-war era. Addressing the war’s role in shaping Scottish national identity, he notes that the devastations witnessed by Hugh MacDiarmid would underlie the vigour and ruthlessness with which he would pursue his vision for a Scotland regenerated. Riach, however, recognising patriotic unionist perspectives such as those of Ian Hay and John Buchan, concludes that the poly-vocal, multi-media and temporally mutable nature of the Scottish literary response to imperialism and world war cannot be reduced or defined to a single party, moment, poem, book or author.

Jamieson, Jargons, Jangles, and Jokes: Hugh MacDiarmid and Dictionaries

Hugh MacDiarmid (Christopher Murray Grieve) used dictionaries in the composition of his ‘synthetic Scots’ and ‘synthetic English’ poetry in volumes such as Sangschaw (1925), Penny Wheep (1926), and Stony Limits and Other Poems (1934). The essay considers his attitudes to artificial languages and to dictionaries in relation to modernity, and his reading of dictionaries and word books against the grain of academicism. It particularly considers John Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language. It goes on to consider how, in his poetry, MacDiarmid places words and phrases that have been gleaned from dictionaries: his placing them in similes, and his leaving some of them unglossed and obscure. It concludes by considering the framing effects of alliteration, and the interplay of artifice and authenticity in MacDiarmid’s poetry.

‘When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my Dictionary’: Poets and Dictionaries, Dictionaries and Poets

Many poets choose to use unusual as well as usual words, exploiting their different possible senses, registers, and sounds, together with their varying cultural, geographical, historical, and etymological associations. In consequence, both poets and other writers have regularly turned to dictionaries to provide raw material for their writing, not least to dictionaries with quotations from other writers. Dictionaries have returned the compliment: from Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) onwards, many monolingual dictionaries of English – and its constituent geographical varieties – have drawn upon the language of well-known writers to support their definitions of usage. This chapter discusses the mutual attraction between poets and dictionaries, and explores the linguistic issues that this relationship raises, particularly for the OED, with reference to writers and critics such as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Hugh MacDiarmid, Seamus Heaney, and others.