Hugh MacDiarmid - Wikipedia Hugh MacDiarmid From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to navigation Jump to search Hugh MacDiarmid A bust of MacDiarmid sculpted in 1927 by William Lamb Born Christopher Murray Grieve 11 August 1892 Langholm, Dumfriesshire, Scotland Died 9 September 1978(1978-09-09) (aged 86) Edinburgh, Scotland Occupation Poet Literary movement Scottish Renaissance Christopher Murray Grieve (11 August 1892 – 9 September 1978), best known by his pen name Hugh MacDiarmid (/məkˈdɜːrmɪd/), was a Scottish poet, journalist, essayist and political figure. He is considered one of the principal forces behind the Scottish Renaissance and has had a lasting impact on Scottish culture and politics. Grieve's earliest work, including Annals of the Five Senses, was written in English, but he is best known for his use of "synthetic Scots", a literary version of the Scots language that he himself developed. From the early 1930s onwards MacDiarmid made greater use of English, sometimes a "synthetic English" that was supplemented by scientific and technical vocabularies. The son of a postman, MacDiarmid was born in the Scottish border town of Langholm, Dumfriesshire. He was educated at Langholm Academy before becoming a teacher for a brief time at Broughton Higher Grade School in Edinburgh. He began his writing career as a journalist in Wales,[1][2][3] contributing to the socialist newspaper The Merthyr Pioneer run by Labour party founder Keir Hardie[2] before joining the Royal Army Medical Corps at the outbreak of the First World War.[3] He served in Salonica, Greece and France before developing cerebral malaria and subsequently returning to Scotland in 1918. MacDiarmid's time in the army was influential in his political and artistic development. After the war he continued to work as a journalist, living in Montrose where he became editor and reporter of the Montrose Review[4] as well as a justice of the peace and a member of the county council. In 1923 his first book, Annals of the Five Senses, was published at his own expense, followed by Sangschaw in 1925, and Penny Wheep. A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, published in 1926, is generally regarded as MacDiarmid's most famous and influential work.[4] Moving to the Shetland island of Whalsay in 1933 with his son Michael and second wife, Valda Trevlyn, MacDiarmid continued to write essays and poetry despite being cut off from mainland cultural developments for much of the 1930s.[3] He died at his cottage Brownsbank, near Biggar, in 1978 at the age of 86.[5] Throughout his life MacDiarmid was a supporter of both communism and Scottish nationalism, views that often put him at odds with his contemporaries. He was a founding member of the National Party of Scotland,[3] forerunner to the modern Scottish National Party. He stood as a candidate for the Scottish National Party in 1945 and 1950, and for the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1964.[4] In 1949, MacDiarmid's opinions led George Orwell to include his name in a list of "those who should not be trusted"[6] to MI5. Today, MacDiarmid's work is credited with inspiring a new generation of writers. Fellow poet Edwin Morgan said of him: "Eccentric and often maddening genius he may be, but MacDiarmid has produced many works which, in the only test possible, go on haunting the mind and memory and casting Coleridgean seeds of insight and surprise."[1] Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Early life 1.2 First World War 1.3 Return to Scotland 1.4 Time in England 1.5 Shetland 1.6 Return to the Scottish Mainland 2 Politics 3 Writing 4 Personal life 5 Places of interest 6 Portrait in National Portrait Gallery primary collection 7 References 8 Bibliography 8.1 Poetry 8.2 Letters 8.3 Anthologies edited by MacDiarmid 8.4 Other 9 Further reading 10 External links Biography[edit] Early life[edit] Grieve was born in Langholm in 1892.[7] His father was a postman; his family lived above the town library, giving MacDiarmid access to books from an early age. Grieve attended Langholm Academy and, from 1908, Broughton Junior Student Centre in Edinburgh, where he studied under George Ogilvie who introduced him to the magazine The New Age. He left the school on 27 January 1911, following the theft of some books and postage stamps; his father died eight days later, on 3 February 1911. Following Grieve's departure from Broughton, Ogilvie arranged for Grieve to be employed as a journalist with the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch. Grieve was to lose this job later in 1911, but on 20 July of that year he had his first article, "The Young Astrology" published in The New Age. In October 1911, Grieve moved to Ebbw Vale in Monmouthshire, Wales[8] where he worked as a newspaper reporter; by 1913 he had returned to Scotland and was working for the Clydebank and Renfrew Press in Clydebank, near Glasgow. It was here that Grieve first encountered the work of John Maclean, Neil Malcolm Maclean, and James Maxton. First World War[edit] In July 1915 Grieve left the town of Forfar in eastern Scotland and travelled to the Hillsborough barracks in Sheffield. He went on to serve in the Royal Army Medical Corps in Salonica, Greece and France during the First World War. After the war, he married and returned to journalism. Return to Scotland[edit] MacDiarmid's first book, Annals of the Five Senses, was a mixture of prose and poetry written in English, and was published in 1923 while MacDiarmid was living in Montrose. At about this time MacDiarmid turned to Scots for a series of books, culminating in what is probably his best known work, the book-length A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. This poem is widely regarded as one of the most important long poems in 20th-century Scottish literature. After that, he published several books containing poems in both English and Scots.[citation needed] Time in England[edit] From 1929 to 1930 MacDiarmid lived in London, and worked for Compton Mackenzie's magazine, Vox. MacDiarmid lived in Liverpool from 1930 to 1931, before returning to London; he left again in 1932, and lived in the village of Thakeham in West Sussex until he returned to Scotland in 1932. Shetland[edit] MacDiarmid lived in Sodom[9] on the island of Whalsay, Shetland, from 1933 until 1942. Return to the Scottish Mainland[edit] In 1942 MacDiarmid was directed to war work and moved to Glasgow, where he lived until 1949. Between 1949 and 1951 he lived in a cottage on the grounds of Dungavel House, Lanarkshire, before moving to his final home: "Brownsbank", a cottage in Candymill, near Biggar in the Scottish Borders. He died, aged 86, in Edinburgh.[10] Politics[edit] Poster for Hugh MacDiarmid exhibition held at the National Library of Scotland in honour of his 75th birthday in 1967. In 1928, MacDiarmid helped found the National Party of Scotland,[11] but was expelled during the 1930s.[12] MacDiarmid was at times a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, but he was expelled twice. John Baglow reports that "his comrades never really knew what to make of him."[13] Indeed, he was expelled from the Communist Party for being a Scottish Nationalist, and from the Scottish National Party for being a Communist.[14] From 1931, whilst he was in London, until 1943, after he had left the Shetland island of Whalsay, MacDiarmid was watched by the British Intelligence Services.[15] In 1949, George Orwell included MacDiarmid in the list of suspected communist sympathisers he compiled to denounce fellow people on the left he thought might be aligned with the USSR to British Intelligence. MacDiarmid stood in the Glasgow Kelvingrove constituency in the 1945 and 1950 general elections. He stood against the Conservative Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home in Kinross and Western Perthshire at the 1964 election, taking only 127 votes. MacDiarmid listed Anglophobia among his hobbies in his Who's Who entry. In 2010 letters were discovered showing that he believed a Nazi invasion of Britain would benefit Scotland. In a letter sent from Whalsay, Shetland, in April 1941, he wrote: "On balance I regard the Axis powers, tho' more violently evil for the time being, less dangerous than our own government in the long run and indistinguishable in purpose." A year earlier, in June 1940, he wrote: "Although the Germans are appalling enough, they cannot win, but the British and French bourgeoisie can and they are a far greater enemy. If the Germans win they could not hold their gain for long, but if the French and British win it will be infinitely more difficult to get rid of them". Marc Horne in the Daily Telegraph commented: "MacDiarmid flirted with fascism in his early thirties, when he believed it was a doctrine of the left. In two articles written in 1923, Plea for a Scottish Fascism and Programme for a Scottish Fascism, he appeared to support Mussolini’s regime. By the 1930s however, following Mussolini’s lurch to the right, his position had changed and he castigated Neville Chamberlain over his appeasement of Hitler’s expansionism."[16] Deirdre Grieve, MacDiarmid's daughter-in-law and literary executor, noted: "I think he entertained almost every ideal it was possible to entertain at one point or another."[16] Writing[edit] Plaque on a building near Gladstone Court Museum, Biggar, South Lanarkshire which was opened by MacDiarmid in 1968. The inscription reads "Let the lesson be - to be yersel's and to mak' that worth bein'" MacDiarmid Memorial near Langholm Much of the work that MacDiarmid published in the 1920s was written in what he termed "Synthetic Scots": a version of the Scots language that "synthesised" multiple local dialects, which MacDiarmid constructed from dictionaries and other sources. From the 1930s onwards MacDiarmid found himself turning more and more to English as a means of expression so that most of his later poetry is written in that language. His ambition was to live up to Rilke's dictum that 'the poet must know everything' and to write a poetry that contained all knowledge. As a result, many of the poems in Stony Limits (1934) and later volumes are a kind of found poetry reusing text from a range of sources. Just as he had used Jameson's dialect dictionary for his poems in 'synthetic Scots', so he used Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary for poems such as 'On a Raised Beach'.[17] Other poems, including 'On a Raised Beach' and 'Etika Preobrazhennavo Erosa' used extensive passages of prose.[18][19] This practice, particularly in the poem 'Perfect', led to accusations of plagiarism[20] from supporters of the Welsh poet Glyn Jones, to which MacDiarmid's response was 'The greater the plagiarism the greater the work of art.' The great achievement of this late poetry is to attempt on an epic scale to capture the idea of a world without God in which all the facts the poetry deals with are scientifically verifiable. In his critical work Lives of the Poets, Michael Schmidt notes that Hugh MacDiarmid 'had redrawn the map of Scottish poetry and affected the whole configuration of English literature'.[21] MacDiarmid wrote a number of non-fiction prose works, including Scottish Eccentrics and his autobiography Lucky Poet. He also did a number of translations from Scottish Gaelic, including Duncan Ban MacIntyre's Praise of Ben Dorain, which were well received by native speakers including Sorley MacLean. Personal life[edit] He had a daughter, Christine, and a son, Walter, by his first wife Peggy Skinner. He had a son, James Michael Trevlyn, known as Michael, by his second wife Valda Trevlyn (1906-1989); Michael was a conscientious objector to post-World War II National Service and became vice chair of the Scottish National Party. Places of interest[edit] MacDiarmid grew up in the Scottish town of Langholm in Dumfriesshire. The town is home to a monument in his honour made of cast iron which takes the form of a large open book depicting images from his writings.[22] MacDiarmid lived in Montrose for a time where he worked for the local newspaper the Montrose Review.[23] MacDiarmid also lived on the isle of Whalsay in Shetland, in Sodom (Sudheim). The house is now one of Shetland's 'Camping Bods', offering basic, bothy-style accommodation to visitors. Brownsbank Cottage, near Biggar, South Lanarkshire, the home of MacDiarmid and his wife Valda from 1952 until their deaths, has been restored by the Biggar Museum Trust.[24] Hugh MacDiarmid is commemorated in Makars' Court, outside the Writers' Museum, Lawnmarket, Edinburgh. Selections for Makars' Court are made by the Writers' Museum, the Saltire Society and the Scottish Poetry Library. Portrait in National Portrait Gallery primary collection[edit] Hugh MacDiarmid sat for sculptor Alan Thornhill and a bronze was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery.[25] The terracotta original is held in the collection of the artist.[26] The correspondence file relating to the MacDiarmid bust is held in the archive[27] of the Henry Moore Foundation's Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. References[edit] ^ a b "Hugh MacDiarmid | Poetry | Scottish Poetry Library". www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk. Retrieved 28 September 2015. ^ a b MacDiarmid, Hugh (1 January 1970). Selected Essays of Hugh MacDiarmid. University of California Press. ISBN 9780520016187. ^ a b c d "Writing Scotland - Hugh MacDiarmid - BBC Two". BBC. Retrieved 28 September 2015. ^ a b c "Grieve, Christopher Murray (Hugh MacDiarmid) genealogy Scotland - ScotlandsPeople". www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk. Retrieved 28 September 2015. ^ "Hugh MacDiarmid: Overview". Retrieved 24 August 2019. ^ Smith, David; arts; correspondent, media (26 October 2003). "Orwell's red-list goes on display". The Observer. ISSN 0029-7712. Retrieved 8 January 2020. ^ Bold, Alan. "MacDiarmid". London: Paladin, 1190. p 35. ^ Wright, Gordon. "MacDiarmid: An Illustrated Biography", Edinburgh. ISBN 0903065177. Gordon Wright Publishing, 1977. p 28. ^ "Sudheim (Sodom)". www.scottish-places.info. The Gazetteer for Scotland. Retrieved 10 May 2020. ^ Bold, Alan. "MacDiarmid". London: Paladin, 1190. p 493. ^ "Hugh MacDiarmid | Poet". Scottish Poetry Library. Retrieved 30 January 2019. ^ "Hugh MacDiarmid". Edinburgh City of Literature. Retrieved 30 January 2019. ^ John Baglow (1987). Hugh MacDiarmid: The Poetry of Self. McGill-Queen's University Press. p. 115. ^ https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/25/hugh-macdiarmid-robert-burns-scots-vernacular-poetry-auld-lang-syne ^ Scott Lyall, '"The Man is a Menace": MacDiarmid and Military Intelligence', in Scottish Studies Review 8.1, Spring 2007, pp. 37-52. ^ a b The Sunday Times 4 April 2010 "Hugh MacDiarmid: I’d prefer Nazi rule" ^ M. H. Whitworth, 'Hugh MacDiarmid and Chambers’s Twentieth Century Dictionary,’ Notes and Queries, 55 (2008), 78-80. ^ M. H. Whitworth, 'Three Prose Sources for Hugh MacDiarmid’s "On a Raised Beach",’ Notes and Queries, 54 (2007), 175-77 ^ M. H. Whitworth, 'Forms of Culture in Hugh MacDiarmid’s "Etika Preobrazhennavo Erosa",’ International Journal of Scottish Literature, no.5 (Autumn/Winter 2009). www.ijsl. stir.ac.uk. ^ Hugh Gordon Porteus, letter, TLS (4 February 1965), 87 ^ Schmidt, Michael: Lives of the Poets, page 643. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007. ^ "MacDiarmid Memorial Unveiled". The Glasgow Herald. 12 August 1985. p. 5. ^ Scott Lyall, '"Genius in a Provincial Town": MacDiarmid's Poetry and Politics in Montrose', in Scottish Studies Review 5.2, Autumn 2004, pp. 41-55. ^ "Brownsbank cottage - Biggar Museum". biggarmuseumtrust.co.uk. Archived from the original on 15 October 2012. ^ "National Portrait Gallery - Portrait - NPG 5230; Hugh MacDiarmid". npg.org.uk. ^ Terracotta head of Hugh MacDiarmid by Alan Thornhill Archived 19 July 2008 at the Wayback Machine ^ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 12 January 2009. Retrieved 10 August 2009.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link) HMI Archive Bibliography[edit] Poetry[edit] Sangschaw (1925) Penny Wheep (1926) A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926) The Lucky Bag (1927) To Circumjack Cencrastus (1930) First Hymn to Lenin and Other Poems (1931) Second Hymn to Lenin (1932) Scots Unbound and Other Poems (1933) Stony Limits and Other Poems (1934) The Birlinn of Clanranald (1936) Second Hymn to Lenin and Other Poems (1937) Speaking for Scotland: Selected Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid (1946) Poems of the East-West Synthesis (1946) A Kist of Whistles (1947) In Memoriam James Joyce (1955) Three Hymns to Lenin (1957) The Battle Continues (1958) The Kind of Poetry I Want (1961) Collected Poems (1962) Poems to Paintings by William Johnstone 1933 (1963) A Lap of Honour (1967) Early Lyrics (1968) A Clyack-Sheaf (1969) More Collected Poems (1970) Selected Poems (1971) The Hugh MacDiarmid Anthology: Poems in Scots and English (1972) Dìreadh (1974) The Complete Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid Volume 1 & 2 (1978) Letters[edit] Bold, Alan. The Letter of Hugh MacDiarmid Kerrigan, Catherine. The Hugh MacDiarmid-George Ogilvie Letters Wilson, Susan R. The Correspondence Between Hugh MacDiarmid and Sorley Maclean Also see: Manson, John. Dear Grieve: Letters to Hugh MacDiarmid (C. M. Grieve) Junor, Beth. Scarcely Ever Out of My Thoughts: The Letters of Valda Trevlyn Grieve to Christopher Murray Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid) Anthologies edited by MacDiarmid[edit] The Golden Treasury of Scottish Poetry (1940) Other[edit] Annals of the Five Senses (1923) A Plea for Scottish Fascism (1923) A Program for Scottish Fascism (1923) Contemporary Scottish Studies (1926-) Scottish Scene (1934) (collaboration with Lewis Grassic Gibbon) Scottish Eccentrics (1938) The Islands of Scotland (1939) Lucky Poet (1943) The Company I've Kept (1966) The Uncanny Scot (1968) [1] Further reading[edit] Baglow, John (1987). Hugh MacDiarmid: The Poetry of Self McGill-Queen's Press Bold, Alan (1983). MacDiarmid: The Terrible Crystal, Routledge & Kegan Paul* Bold, Alan (1988). MacDiarmid A Critical Biography, John Murray Glen, Duncan (1964). Hugh Macdiarmid (Christopher Murray Grieve) and the Scottish Renaissance , Chambers, Edinburgh et al. Herbert, W. N. (1992). To Circumjack MacDiarmid: The Poetry and Prose of Hugh MacDiarmid. Oxford: Clarendon Lyall, Scott (2006). Hugh MacDiarmid's Poetry and Politics of Place: Imagining a Scottish Republic, Edinburgh University Press Lyall, Scott and Margery Palmer McCulloch (eds) (2011). The Edinburgh Companion to Hugh MacDiarmid, Edinburgh University Press Purdie, Bob (2012). Hugh MacDiarmid, Black, Green, Red and Tartan Welsh Academic Press Riach, Alan (1991). Hugh MacDiarmid’s Epic Poetry, Edinburgh University Press Wright, Gordon (1977). MacDiarmid: An Illustrated Biography, Gordon Wright Publishing External links[edit] Quotations related to Hugh MacDiarmid at Wikiquote Hugh MacDiarmid profile at Carcanet Press Hugh MacDiarmid reading his poetry at the Poetry Archive Second Hymn to Lenin by Hugh MacDiarmid HUGH MACDIARMID: A Portrait Film about MacDiarmid at the Scottish Screen Archive, National Library of Scotland Review of Bob Purdie's book Archival material at Leeds University Library Some notes of MacDiarmid's Gaelic Idea Authority control BIBSYS: 90052721 BNF: cb11886845z (data) GND: 118639382 ISNI: 0000 0003 6854 6221 LCCN: n80045888 LNB: 000081864 NDL: 00448333 NKC: skuk0001615 NLA: 35150955 NTA: 068995970 PLWABN: 9810562445905606 SELIBR: 194625 SNAC: w6hx1cpp SUDOC: 027514447 Trove: 843140 VIAF: 17217819 WorldCat Identities: lccn-n80045888 ^ Scott, Allexander (17 October 1968). "Some MacDiarmid flytings". The Glasgow Herald. Retrieved 28 October 2017. Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hugh_MacDiarmid&oldid=998165946" Categories: 1892 births 1978 deaths Scottish non-fiction writers Communist Party of Great Britain members Historical linguists Lallans poets Modernist poets British Army personnel of World War I Royal Army Medical Corps soldiers Scottish biographers Scottish communists Scottish essayists Scottish journalists Scottish memoirists Scottish National Party politicians Scots Makars Scottish soldiers Scottish translators People from Langholm Scottish Renaissance Scottish linguists Scots-language writers Translators from Scottish Gaelic 20th-century Scottish writers 20th-century Scottish poets Scottish male poets 20th-century British translators Alumni of the Edinburgh College of Art 20th-century essayists Pseudonymous writers People associated with Shetland Hidden categories: Webarchive template wayback links CS1 maint: archived copy as title Use dmy dates from September 2020 All articles with unsourced statements Articles with unsourced statements from August 2013 Wikipedia articles with BIBSYS identifiers Wikipedia articles with BNF identifiers Wikipedia articles with GND identifiers Wikipedia articles with ISNI identifiers Wikipedia articles with LCCN identifiers Wikipedia articles with LNB identifiers Wikipedia articles with NDL identifiers Wikipedia articles with NKC identifiers Wikipedia articles with NLA identifiers Wikipedia articles with NTA identifiers Wikipedia articles with PLWABN identifiers Wikipedia articles with SELIBR identifiers Wikipedia articles with SNAC-ID identifiers Wikipedia articles with SUDOC identifiers Wikipedia articles with Trove identifiers Wikipedia articles with VIAF identifiers Wikipedia articles with WORLDCATID identifiers Navigation menu Personal tools Not logged in Talk Contributions Create account Log in Namespaces Article Talk Variants Views Read Edit View history More Search Navigation Main page Contents Current events Random article About Wikipedia Contact us Donate Contribute Help Learn to edit Community portal Recent changes Upload file Tools What links here Related changes Upload file Special pages Permanent link Page information Cite this page Wikidata item Print/export Download as PDF Printable version In other projects Wikiquote Languages تۆرکجه Cymraeg Deutsch Español Euskara Français Gàidhlig Italiano Қазақша مصرى Norsk bokmål Polski Русский Scots Svenska Edit links This page was last edited on 4 January 2021, at 03:42 (UTC). 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