What happened to MacDiarmid

David Norbrook

  • Hugh MacDiarmid: The Man and his Work by Nancy Gish
    Macmillan, 235 pp, £25.00, June 1984, ISBN 0 333 29473 4
  • Complete Poems by Hugh MacDiarmid
    Penguin, £8.95, February 1985, ISBN 0 01 400791 6

In Exiles and Emigrés (1970) Terry Eagleton argued that modern British culture had proved incapable of producing a major writer who could analyse society as a whole. It had collapsed into a ‘withered empiricism’. And English poetry in this century has seemed to many to confirm this analysis, the dominant voice being one of cautious ‘common sense’ tinged with a wistful conservatism:

                            an immense load
Of self-neutralising moral and social qualities,
Above all, Circumspection.

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[*] The other recent studies are: Alan Bold’s comprehensive overview, MacDiarmid: The Terrible Crystal (Routledge, 1983); the revised edition of Kenneth Buthlay’s crisp and witty introduction in the Scottish Authors Series, Hugh MacDiarmid (Scottish Academic Press, 1982); Catherine Kerrigan’s survey of the intellectual background to the earlier poetry, Whaur extremes meet (James Thin, 1983); Harvey Oxenhorn’s critical study of the poems up to ‘On a Raised Beach’, Elemental Things: The Poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid (Edinburgh University Press, 1984); and Roderick Watson’s study, based on an Open University course, MacDiarmid (Open University Press, 1985).