Scottish Authors > Sydney Goodsir Smith Poet, Playwright & Critic 1915-1975

Born in Wellington, New Zealand on 25th October 1915, Sydney Goodsir Smith's father was an army medical officer, and his mother was Scottish. He was educated in England at Malvern College before starting a medical degree at Edinburgh University, where his father was professor of forensic medicine. Hating anatomy, he abandoned this degree and went to Oxford instead to study at Oriel College. Thereafter he returned to Scotland, whose culture and history he enthusiastically embraced, and which was to form the basis of all his subsequent work.

Now viewed by some as an equal with Hugh MacDiarmid as a poet of the Scottish Renaissance, Goodsir Smith quickly adopted Scots for his poetry, appropriating many archaicisms and delving deep into the late medieval tradition of Scottish makars for stylistic inspiration. Although plainly influenced by poets such as Dunbar and Henryson and Gavin Douglas, he fused his admiration for their technique with his own very distinctive, sometimes unwieldy language, creating a vibrant, romantic and frequently bawdy voice.

His first collection, Skail wind, was published in 1941, but it was not until his third collection, The Deevil's waltz (1946), that he showed the extent of his talent. A poet with a Rabelaisian enjoyment of words and literary texture, he at times strained the reader's - or performer's - patience, as with his hilarious novel, Carotid Cornucopius (1947), in which he draws a vivid picture of Edinburgh low life, replete with wit, vulgarity, affection and such detonations as:

... whaile owre the sceane rained heich in the havens the gloarianguished dumble-watergaw in ilka calour in the spookitrain, frae gowden yallow til the dowpest impurpietrude ...

Goodsir Smith's play, The Wallace, performed at the Edinburgh Festival of 1960, was not wholly a success, striving to cover too much ground in an idiom compromised by his attempt to cater for a partly English audience. Nevertheless it showed again the poet's fondness for tongue-twisting vocabulary. Actor Iain Cuthbertson, who played Wallace, commented that the language "was eminently speakable, once one had a firm grip of one's dentures".

Goodsir Smith's finest work was his twenty-four part celebration of romantic love, Under the Eildon tree (1948), described by fellow poet Alexander Scott as "the greatest extended poem on passion in the whole Scots tradition". By turns rumbustious, tender and tragic, it is the best example of his ability to combine a wide range of emotions and tone, of his talent at evoking atmosphere, at poking fun at himself, and at creating a realistically fragmented sliver of human experience.

Goodsir Smith was for several years art critic for The Scotsman. He was a dedicated amateur painter, a gifted translator of such writers as Tristan Corbiere and Alexander Blok, and was widely loved for his wit, intelligence and good humour. Although his literary output was relatively small, it achieved considerable recognition, both for himself and for the richness and versatility of the Scots language. He died in 1975. What survives in print is only an echo of the man in person.

Rosemary Goring

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