Hugh MacDiarmid is the pseudonym of the poet Christopher Murray Grieve (1892–1978), founder of the National Party of Scotland. His poem ‘Two Scottish Boys’, with its four epigraphs, argues that poets need to be more like scientists. The two ‘boys’ he compares are the Celtic twilight poet William Sharp (1855–1905), who wrote under the pseudonym ‘Fiona Macleod’, and the physician and tropical medicine expert Sir Patrick Manson (1844–1922), nicknamed ‘Mosquito Manson’, who (see p. 204) first suggested to Ronald Ross that the mosquito was host to the malaria parasite. ‘Bunyan’s quag’ (line 4) is the Slough of Despond in The Pilgrim’s Progress; Sainte-Beuve (line 21) was a nineteenth-century French critic, and the French quotation is from an essay he published in 1857 about Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary.
Not only was Thebes built by the music of an Orpheus, but without the music of some inspired Orpheus was no city ever built, no work that man glories in ever done.
Thomas Carlyle
For the very essence of poetry is truth, and as soon as a word’s not true it’s not poetry, though it may wear the cast clothes of it.
George MacDonald
Poetry never goes back on you. Learn as many pieces as you can. Go over them again and again till the words come of themselves, and then you have a joy forever which cannot be stolen or broken or lost. This is much better than diamond rings on every finger… The thing you cannot get a pigeon-hole for is the finger-point showing the way to discovery.
Sir Patrick Manson
Science is the Differential Calculus of the mind. Art the Integral Calculus; they may be beautiful when apart, but are greatest only when combined.
Sir Ronald Ross
There were two Scottish boys, one roamed seashore and hill
Drunk with the beauty of many a lovely scene,
And finally lost in nature’s glory as in a fog,
Tossing him into chaos, like Bunyan’s quag in the Valley of the Shadow.
The other having shot a lean and ferocious cat
On his father’s farm, was profoundly interested
In a tapeworm he found when he investigated
Its internal machinery in the seclusion of his attic room,
– A ‘prologue to the omen coming on’!
For while the first yielded nothing but high-falutin nonsense,
Spiritual masturbation of the worst description,
From the second down the crowded years I saw
Heroism, power for and practice of illimitable good emerge,
Great practical imagination and God-like thoroughness,
And mighty works of knowledge, tireless labours,
Consummate skill, high magnanimity, and undying Fame,
A great campaign against unbroken servility,
Ceaseless mediocrity and traditional immobility,
To the end that European reason may sink back no more
Into the immemorial embraces of the supernatural …
Sainte-Beuve was right – the qualities we most need
(Most of all in sentimental Scotland) are indeed
‘Science, esprit d’observation, maturité, force,
Un peu de dureté,’ and poets who, like Gustave Flaubert,
(That son and brother of distinguished doctors) wield
Their pens as these their scalpels, and that their work
Should everywhere remind us of anatomists and physiologists.
Poet and therefore scientist the latter, while the former,
No scientist, was needs a worthless poet too.
Source: The Complete Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid 1920–76, London, Martin Brian & O’Keeffe, 1978.