Gale Researcher Guide for: Britain's Languages and Regional Literatures: The Case of Hugh MacDiarmid

Rogers, Samuel

Abstract

C. M. Grieves played a crucial role in Scottish public life and, under his famous pseudonym — Hugh MacDiarmid — produced some of the world’s most important poetry of the first half of the twentieth century. MacDiarmid is best known for his innovations in “synthetic Scots” — a form of the Scottish vernacular based not only on common speech but also on the purposeful rediscovery of archaic vocabularies from textual sources. His poems of the 1920s, in particular, dramatize in their very linguistic texture key issues of nationhood, history, language, and identity, and the long poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926) represents a significant milestone in British modernist poetics. Throughout MacDiarmid’s varied and prodigious career, his poems deal in politics, humor, love and sex, the cosmos, and everything in between. From the 1930s onward, he makes a general move away from Scots language, but his poems are no less challenging. Surveying the spiritual, environmental, and political mysteries of human life, MacDiarmid stakes a claim for the key role poets play in making sense of experience.

• Book Type: Monograph
• Publication Date: Aug 3, 2018
• Peer Reviewed: Not Peer Reviewed
• ISBN: 9781535853064
• Keywords: Hugh Macdiarmid, modernism, biography, British Modernism, regional literature, British literature, Scottish literature
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/906217
• Contract Date: Nov 14, 2016