PANEL 127    Hugh MacDiarmid

Hugh MacDiarmid’s masterpiece, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle incorporates a passage on the General Strike – a pessimistic response to its failure. The great lyric is a montage of invective and humour and a collection of themes dealt with in what seem like distinct poems. But it has an authentic voice in Scots – something MacDiarmid imbibed in his youth in the Borders town of Langholm. It begins:

 

I amna fou sae muckle as tired – deid dune.

It’s gey and hard wark coupin’ gless for gless

Wi’ Cruivie and Gilsanquhar and the like,

And I’m no’ juist as bauld as aince I wes.

Christened Christopher Murray Grieve, MacDiarmid was born in Langholm in 1892 and he led a deeply individual life. During the 1930s, he was expelled from the Communist Party for being a Scottish Nationalist and then expelled from the Scottish National Party for being a communist. And, in 1956, when Soviet tanks invaded Hungary, he rejoined the Communist Party. Living in abject poverty, scraping a living with journalism, MacDiarmid worked tirelessly as a poet and writer and happily admitted that his work was of variable quality. But he was undoubtedly a Scottish literary genius, enormously influential, thrawn and indefatigable. When MacDiarmid died in 1978, his fellow poet, Norman MacCaig, suggested that each year the great man’s passing be celebrated by two minutes’ pandemonium.

 

Panel stitched by:

The Albyn Stitchers

Barbara Gregor

Linda Herd

Diana Herriot

Samantha Townsend

Stitched in:

Livingston