Other literary forms
Hugh MacDiarmid (mak-DUR-mihd) wrote prolifically through most of his life. His more than seventy books include social criticism, political polemics, autobiography, and literary criticism. He edited earlier Scottish poets such as William Dunbar and Robert Burns and several poetry anthologies, and he founded and edited a number of Scottish periodicals.
Achievements
Only slowly has Hugh MacDiarmid come to be recognized as a major twentieth century poet. He spent most of his life laboring in one way or another for Scotland and won his earliest acclaim there. He was a founder, in 1927, of the Scottish Center of PEN, the international writers’ organization, and of the National Party of Scotland the following year, although his always radical political views led him into the Communist Party in the 1930’s.
Despite his extreme social and political views, his friends were legion. He once observed that few other people could boast of friendships with William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Dylan Thomas, and the circle of his admirers extended worldwide. After many years of promoting, usually undiplomatically, Scotland and Scottish culture, he was awarded a Civil List pension in 1950, and although his criticism of Scottish education continued unabated, Edinburgh University awarded him an honorary doctor of laws degree in 1957.
Not until the 1960’s, however, did MacDiarmid’s poetry begin to appear in British and modern poetry anthologies. Despite a general awakening to his greatness since that time, reliable commentary of his work remains largely in the hands of Scottish critics. As an innovator in modern literature, MacDiarmid deserves to be ranked with Eliot, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett.
Discussion Topics
What personal qualities and intellectual proclivities have most likely undermined Hugh MacDiarmid’s attempt at fostering a Scottish literary Renaissance?
Given MacDiarmid’s conviction that bad imitations of Robert Burns ruined Scottish poetry, was he wise to write as many dialect poems as he did?
Analyze the comic elements in MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle.
Examine the range of symbolic potentialities in MacDiarmid’s thistle.
Characterize the Scottish environment as MacDiarmid presents it in “Water Music.”
Which is the greater challenge to the reader: MacDiarmid’s reconstructed Scottish dialect in his earlier poems or the weight of knowledge he brought to his later English poems?
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