Owen and Sassoon: The Edinburgh Poems

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Susan R. Wilson (ed.), The Correspondence Between Hugh MacDiarmid and Sorley MacLean: an annotated edition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010)

Nancy Gish (ed.), Hugh MacDiarmid: man and poet (Maine: National Poetry Foundation; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992) The literary arguments intertwined with crises in MacDiarmid’s personal life. His first wife, Peggy Skinner, left him for a coal merchant. He met his second wife, Valda Trevlyn, and with their young son Michael, went to Shetland in 1933. Here, physical and mental breakdown followed a period of intense isolation, introspection and psychological anxiety. Astonishingly, his greatest poems of the 1930s delivered a way through the crises. ‘Lament for the Great Music’ reconnects with deeper traditions, the classical music of the Highland bagpipe and all that signifies for a multi-layered, complex, tragic, defiant, strengthening, persistent national character. ‘On a Raised Beach’ begins with the poet utterly alone but it ends with the understanding that life is an act of participation in a way the lonely observer could not comprehend.Christopher Whyte, ‘The 1960s’ in Modern Scottish Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004) One of the principal figures behind the Scottish Renaissance of the mid-20th century, Hugh MacDiarmid, was an influential poet and writer. stanza XV: The dismal Coronach....): The Coronach of the Highlanders, like the Ululatus of the Romans, and the Ululoo of the Irish, was a wild expression of lamentation poured forth by the mourners over the body of a departed friend. When the words of it were articulate, they expressed the praises of the deceased, and the loss the clan would sustain by his death. The Coronach has for some years past been superseded at funerals by the use of the bagpipe, and that also is, like many other Highland peculiarities, falling into disuse, unless in remote districts. I wanted to know what he was doing, where he was going, who was he meeting and how the geography and environment of Edinburgh, this city of Enlightenment helped to propel his thinking and his writing.

The Voice of Scotland: a quarterly magazine of Scottish arts and affairs (1938-1958) Selected Biography & Criticism Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 27: Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, 1945-1960, Gale, 1984. MacCaig’s life and poetry was principally divided into two parts, represented by two locales. Although he takes his reader with him on visits to New York and Italy, the locality of the bulk of his poetry is divided between two Scottish locations. His home city of Edinburgh provided contrast with his holiday home of Assynt, a remote area in the North-West of Scotland where MacCaig spent much time, especially in the summer months. The landscape and people of Assynt provided inspiration for his poetry as well as bringing MacCaig close friendships and a love for the land.

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Tending towards the playful, MacCaig is not normally a political poet but in 'A Man In Assynt', his longest work, the reader is given a sense of the injustice which the North-West has suffered. Asked by the BBC to write a poem on the area which had been the subject of much of his poetry, MacCaig exposed the oppression and depopulation of a land which for too long had been possessed by rich or distant landlords. Distaste for authority and the oppression it can cause are explored in the question which he takes as the premise of this poem: 'who owns this land?' Rather than claim the land for himself or those who live there, MacCaig questions the notion of owning a landscape and decides that the area is in fact 'masterless'. What irritates the speaker is the destruction that mastery has caused Assynt. and not quite worthy of, all that history and grandeur. The dismay at the absence of King and Parliament from Scotland's