Voices of Scotland

The names of those who have helped forged Scotland's place in literature are innumerable. Recently, the company behind Edinburgh Park installed twelve bronze busts in their grounds. These mounted heads, or herms, depict poets who have made a significant contribution to the canon of literature. A second set were exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in an exhibition curated by Julie Lawson. There are fresh plans to tour the exhibits in the future.

It is perhaps unsurprising that Scotland has given rise to so many eminent poets, given the country's linguistic richness. The author of prose or poetry in Scotland encounters a problem, even before the first capital letter scratches at the paper. Which voice befits the sentiment? This multiplicity of voices – Gaelic, Scots, English and the myriad of regional dialects – has leant itself to a diverse literary culture.

Rhythms of the Gael

One of the twelve Edinburgh Park heads depicts Raasay poet, Sorley MacLean, or in Gaelic, Somhairle MacGill-Eain. Born in Osgaig on October 1911, the young Sorley was enchanted by the musical quality of Gaelic story and song. Although he attended Edinburgh University and wrote his first poems in his second language of English, it was Gaelic he would return to in his celebrated writings. He said of the language, '. . . it is immensely flexible metrically and in syntax, especially in its capacity for indicating positions and degrees of emphasis . . .'. After penning his first major poem, The Heron, in Gaelic, he ripped up all his previous English poetry, and, throughout his life, was constantly apologising for the translations of his work.

Despite finding a well of material in the beauty of the Raasay landscape, MacLean's vision extended beyond the island. Appalled at the prospect of Europe under Fascist yoke, he flirted with Communism. However, his long poem The Cuillin, begun at the outbreak of World War II, was halted after he became disillusioned with the behaviour of the Russian government to the Polish Insurrection of 1944. A soldier in North Africa, MacLean left some memorable verses beyond his death in 1996 and did much to revive the language. His moving poem Hallaig which talks of the devastation left behind after the Highland Clearances comprises part of Peter Maxwell-Davies' opera, The Jacobite Rising.

"The window is nailed and boarded through which I saw the West," he writes, describing the roads previously walked by the island children as vanishing 'under mild moss.'

Linguistic Renaissance

While MacLean chose Scots Gaelic, Borders-born Hugh MacDiarmid breathed vitality into Scots. Regarded as arguably the most prominent Scottish poetic voice of the 20th Century, the late MacDiarmid's conviction that Scots should be used in verse led to him being cited as the force behind the Scottish Renaissance. MacDiarmid rifled old Scots dictionaries and sparked new vigour into a language considered exhausted by detractors. His 1926 poem A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle was described by critic David Daiches as 'the greatest long poem in Scottish literature and one of the greatest in any literature.' A dramatic monologue in ballad structure, the poem is suffused with literary allusion and philosophical investigation. Intended as a rambling address to the Thistle (or Scotland) and wider humanity, the prominent Nationalist cleverly demonstrates that the language of the Scot is robust enough to debate everything below heaven or above.

Though less typically 'Scottish', poets such as Edinburgh-born Norman MacCaig and Douglas Dunn are nevertheless regarded as two of the country's finest. A classics scholar at Edinburgh University and a conscientious objector in the Second World War, the late MacCaig's poetry in English is economical but highly readable and immensely popular. Ted Hughes wrote of him: "whenever I meet his poems, I'm always struck by their undated freshness, everything about them is alive, as new and essential, as ever." His handle on nature comes across vividly in November Night, Edinburgh where he talks of the night tinkling 'like ice in glasses' and frost in his lungs 'as harsh as leaves scraped up on paths.'

Unlike MacCaig, Renfrewshire-born Dunn had spent much of his life in England before he returned north to become Professor of English at St. Andrews University in 1991. Still prolific, some of his most moving lines were penned following the death of his wife, Leslie Balfour Dunn, from cancer in 1981, age 37. In Pretended Homes he writes,

I make a flat stone skid across the sea
And all my calling cannot bring her back
To this real house, she in so much of it.

Posthumous Approval

Another Scots poet who worked in English is only now being recognised for his talents, years after his death in 1986. Greenock-born William Sydney Graham is one of the twelve busts shaped by contemporary sculptors, Michael Snowden, Anthony Morrow, David Annand, Archie Forrest, Alex Main, Bill Scott and Vincent Butler. Graham lived much of his life in Cornwall in near poverty and had to take occasional work copywriting and fishing to supplement his earnings. His publisher at Faber and Faber, T.S. Eliot admired his poetry, particularly his signature collection, The Nightfishing. Still, it took time for the public to warm to him. Championed by his friend Harold Pinter, Graham's work is being re-evaluated today, Pinter hailing his language as 'magical.'

Counter Cultures

English may be the preferred voice of the modern literary establishment but that has given rise to a reaction in modern Scotland. Poets such as Edwin Morgan and Tom Leonard or the 'Glasgow poets' have produced acclaimed verse, placing a mirror up to the lives of the working classes. Morgan, OBE, was crowned Glasgow's first Poet Laureate or the Scots Makar in 1999. A celebrated writer in diverse forms, Morgan's poetry, although in English, embraces grassroots Scotland and topical events. In Glasgow Sonnets, he talks of tenements 'condemned to stand, not crash.' The weary people he speaks of, wandering between close and laundrette, wear shoes that 'carry a world that weighs us like a judge.' Leonard, too, rallies fiercely against linguistic snobbery. He goes further, often writing phonetically in a Glaswegian accent. In Good Style from Intimate Voices, he humorously writes,

helluva hard tay read theez init
stull
if yi canny unnirston them jiss clear aff then.

Poet and playwright Liz Lochhead has won widespread admiration in recent times for her work in adapting acclaimed works such as Dracula and Moliere's Tartuffe into modern rhyming Scots for the stage.

The Need to Belong

If language has focused the mind of our great poets, so, too, has the essence of identity. Iain Crichton Smith was raised in Lewis and learned English as a second language after Gaelic. Despite his passionate interest in highland life, he felt stifled by its confines including the dogma of the Free Church. The characters who walk his stanzas are often alienated figures, out of time or place. Of the present day Scottish poets, Jackie Kay's work examines the complexity of inner identity. Born in Edinburgh, of African descent, she was adopted by a white couple and raised in Bishopbriggs. Her first collection, The Adoption Papers, won the Saltire Society Scottish First Book Award. In an interview soon after, she claimed she felt motivated to write because, 'there was no one else saying the things I wanted to say.'

The need to say something burned ceaselessly within Scottish poet and novelist, Naomi Mitchison. Oxford educated and of landed stock, Mitchison tackled taboos such as abortion and rape, particularly in her censored work of 1935, We Have Been Warned. Another of the twelve Edinburgh Park poets, Hamish Henderson, chose his experiences in the African Desert War as the inspiration for his Elegies For The Dead In Cyrenaica.

Today, the Scottish Poetry Library houses the most extensive collection of Scottish poetry in print and tirelessly promotes the dissemination of the country's verse world-wide. With such resources, and with the unlimited imagination of its people, Scotland's many voices will continue to be heard in years to come.