Tradition and an Individual Talent

Hugh MacDiarmid1

Though he would have been the last to admit any comparison of himself with an Englishman, Hugh MacDiarmid’s poetic career reminds me of Wordsworth’s. Both discovered early a way of affiliating an individual talent to a submerged tradition; both professed a diction that was deliberately at variance with prevalent modes; both wrote classic lyric poetry in a short period of intense creativity and followed this by turning their lyric discoveries towards more ambitious goals, producing long meditative poems that wove their personal poetic and public worlds into a single major artistic form. The Prelude and A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle are the central achievements in the Wordsworth and MacDiarmid canons, emerging as plateaus of typical excellence towards which the earlier work was leading and in the shadow of which their later work is inevitably viewed.

Again like the young Wordsworth, MacDiarmid has a sense of an enervating cultural situation—he saw Scottish civilization as damned and doomed by influences from south of the Border—that is intimately linked with his linguistic obsessions. He set out not so much to purify as to restore the language of the tribe, with a passion that was as philological as it was poetic. Dictionaries are necessary to his diction. Lallans, his poetic Scots language, is based on the language of men, specifically on the dialect of his home district around Langholm in Dumfriesshire, but its attractive gaudiness is qualified by the not infrequent inanities of his English, for he occasionally speaks a language that the ones in Langholm do not know. You get on the one hand the self-delighting flood of ‘Water Music’ where the Scots and the latinate English furl together in a downpour of energy:

Archin’ here and arrachin there,

    Allevolie or allemand,

Whiles appliable, whiles areird,

    The polysemous poem’s planned.

Lively, louch, atweesh, atween,

    Auchimuty or aspate,

Threidin’ through the averins,

    Or bightsom in the aftergait.

Here is a poetry that communicates before it is understood, where the auditory imagination is entirely capable of penetrating to a basic meaning spoken by the music of the vocabulary, alien though that vocabulary may be. On the other hand, how are you to respond to this, from ‘On a Raised Beach’?

What artist poses the Earth écorché thus,

Pillar of creation engouled me?

What eburnation augments you with men’s bones,

Every energumen an Endymion yet?

All the other stones are in this haeccity it seems.

But where is the Christophanic rock that moved?

What Cabirian song from this catasta comes?

There is an uncertainty about language here, peculiar not just to MacDiarmid, but to others who write generally in English, but particularly out of a region where the culture and language are at variance with standard English utterance and attitudes.

It can be a problem of style for Americans, West Indians, Indians, Scots and Irish. Joyce made a myth and a mode out of this self-consciousness, but he did so by taking on the English language itself and wrestling its genius with his bare hands, making it lie down where all its ladders start, in the rag-and-bone shop of Indo-European origins and relationships. And it is this Joyce of Finnegans Wake who is invoked in the introductory verse of ‘Water Music’:

Wheest, wheesht, Joyce, and let me hear

    Nae Anna Livvy’s lilt,

But Wauchope, Esk and Ewes again

    Each wi’ its ain rhythms till’t.

In the poem, the local and the indigenous, which were Joyce’s obsession also, are affiliated to oral and instinctive characteristics of the region and the intensity and volubility of the regional diction, while they embody both personal feeling and technical virtuosity, eschew experiment and cosmopolitan perspectives, indulge in no comparative or all-inclusive mythology of rivers. The man who writes the poem is manifestly literate but opts for a local geography and idiom that aspires to subdue rather than include the world in its little room.

‘On a Raised Beach’ proceeds on completely different lines. If Burns and Dunbar are tributaries in the stream of Lallans, the portentous and absurd shadow of William McGonagall sometimes haunts MacDiarmid’s English. The epic voice goes epileptic:

Diallage of the world’s debate, end of the long auxesis,

Although no ebrillade of Pegasus can here avail,

I prefer your enchorial characters—the futhore of the future—

To the hieroglyphics of all other forms of Nature.

In attempting a poetry of ideas MacDiarmid can write like a lunatic lexicographer. What is missing in his phantasmagoric English is what Joyce possessed in such abundance, the sense of the ridiculous, a compulsion to parody. When his brow furrows with earnest ambition and his pedantic Scottish pipe begins its relentless drone we witness the amazing metamorphosis of genius into bore. He decks out the insights of a poet with the egregious jargons of the encyclopaedia and while his intention is explicit in ‘The Kind of Poetry I Want’—‘a poetry full of erudition, expertise and ecstasy’, ‘a poetry like an operating theatre’, a marxist-humanist poetry of modern consciousness and experience—his execution is often such as to bring his great gifts to the level of bathos. Yet when he succeeds, as he does with a fluency and dignity in ‘Island Funeral’, the result is an unusually direct and central seriousness, a man speaking to men.

In A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, MacDiarmid retrieves for modern poetry the image of the poet offered by the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads: a man endued with a lively sensibility, unusual enthusiasm and tenderness, a great knowledge of human nature, a comprehensive soul, a man rejoicing in the spirit of life that is in him and delighted to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the universe. The poem is written in Scots and has for its protagonist a man full of Scotch whisky—even that has been adulterated, ‘the stuffie’s no’ the real Mackay’—playing truant in a ditch from a wife that he loves, through one whole moonlit night. Such a persona in such a situation allows MacDiarmid to dramatize an amazing number of moods, express opinions, achieve ‘pure’ and ‘didactic’ effects, be comic, elegaic, satiric or tragic as the drink burns or dies in the speaker. He is more full-bodied than Tiresias, more domesticated than Crazy Jane, more raucous than Crispin, but despite his local accent, he speaks on equal terms with these memorable creations of our time.

Hibernia, 1972