Scottish Authors > Hugh MacDiarmid Poet 1892-1978

Hugh MacDiarmid was born Christopher Murray Grieve on 11th August 1892 in Langholm, Dumfriesshire. He derived much of his future radicalism from his father, a rural postman, and from the fiercely independent tradition of the burgh. At Langholm Academy he was taught by Francis George Scott, the composer who was later to set to music so many of his lyrics. When Grieve was a pupil-teacher in Edinburgh his literary abilities were encouraged by George Ogilvie, whose advice he sought and generally accepted over many years. After the death of his father, in 1911, Grieve turned to journalism. He served in the RAMC from 1915 to 1920, and eventually found himself in 1921 editor-reporter of the Montrose review.

In Montrose he threw himself into the political life of the community, and from Montrose he edited and published the three issues of Northern numbers, representative collections of contemporary Scottish poetry, and a remarkable series of periodicals, of which the first was the most important. The Scottish chapbook proclaimed its editor's belief in the possibility of a great Scottish Literary Renaissance; its motto was "Not Traditions-Precedents".

It was in the first number of the Chapbook (August 1922) that Hugh MacDiarmid made his appearance, as the author of a semi-dramatic study, Nisbet, but the third number printed a poem by Hugh MacDiarmid, The Watergaw, which had already appeared anonymously the month before in an article of Grieve's in the Dunfermline Press.

Grieve's first original book, Annals of the five senses (1923), was also published from the author's home in Montrose. It is dedicated to John Buchan, who two years later provided the preface to MacDiarmid's first volume of poetry, Sangschaw. A perceptive reviewer recognized that MacDiarmid was writing:

... in the belief that Scotland still has something to say to the imagination of mankind, something that she alone among the nations can say only in her native tongue.

A Drunk man looks at the thistle, which is generally considered the poet's greatest achievement, appeared in 1926. Here exquisite lyrics are integrated into the erratic progression and glorious illogicality of the drunk man's wayward thought.

While MacDiarmid was writing and publishing these poems Grieve was contributing to the Scottish educational journal a notable series of articles. These Contemporary Scottish studies gave a new perspective on the literary scene in Scotland, attacking almost every respected member of the establishment. They were published as a book in 1926, and fifty years later were reprinted by the Journal with the "furious and fascinating" correspondence they had immediately evoked.

MacDiarmid's First hymn to Lenin, a poem which greatly influenced the English poets sympathetic to Communism: Auden, Spender, and Day Lewis, was published in 1931. In that same year Grieve's wartime marriage ended in divorce. His second marriage, to Valda Trevlyn, began a partnership that endured. The Grieves moved in 1933 to the Shetland island of Whalsay, which was their home for the next nine years.

Surmounting the difficulties of poverty and remoteness MacDiarmid produced in 1934 three important books: a miscellany, Scottish scene, in collaboration with Lewis Grassic Gibbon, a collection of essays, At the sign of the thistle; and a further volume of poems, Stony limits, in which he moved towards a new use of English. In 1936 Scottish eccentrics appeared, of which a friend commented that the book's glaring omission was a final chapter on CM Grieve; and in 1939 The Islands of Scotland, an idiosyncratic look at the Hebrides, Orkney, and Shetland. MacDiarmid's most individual and unusual autobiography, Lucky poet: a self-study in literature and political ideas (1943), is a fascinating and heady mixture of prose and poetry, chaotic and irritatingly repetitive, but stimulating and full of interesting ideas: a unique book.

Grieve/MacDiarmid published in all some thirty major books, and he left traces of a number of unfulfilled projects, "intentions subsequently abandoned or subsumed in other works". Of these the most important is the prodigiously long poem, Mature art, of which parts were published as In Memoriam James Joyce (1955) and The Kind of poetry I want (1961). The "as-yet unpublished third volume" was to be called Impavidi Progrediamur, later given the Scots title, Haud forrit.

MacDiarmid's poems in Scots range widely both in form and in imaginative intensity: there are the deceptively simple, the humorous, the powerfully realized, the hauntingly beautiful, the richer linguistically, such as Water music (one of his many tributes to James Joyce), and the later, austere Shetland lyrics in Stony limits. In Stony limits, too, in English, we find poems of political protest and propaganda along with the linguistic experiments, and the profound meditation, On a raised beach, and such gems as the well known quatrain, The Little white rose, with its echo of Yeats, another of his contemporaries with whom MacDiarmid stands comparison.

MacDiarmid's later poetry may well be the kind he wanted, but not all his readers can readily accept the lengthy cataloguing of prosaic facts, the interminable quotations, the scientific data, the contradictions, yet in this "strong solution of books" we are always conscious of the poet at work and in control.

MacDiarmid is a difficult poet, but he can also write simply and directly, just as the man who could be so vitriolic and opinionated an adversary was also one of the kindliest and most generous of friends.

The Grieves had moved in 1951 to a cottage near Biggar, and this was the poet's home until his death on 9th September 1978. He was buried in Langholm, where a memorial sculpture now stands.

A reader coming to MacDiarmid's poetry may well be daunted by the 1500 pages of the two-volume Complete poems, edited by Michael Grieve and WR Aitken, but there is an excellent introduction in the Selected poems, edited by Alan Riach and Michael Grieve. Another guide to the essential MacDiarmid is The Thistle rises, an anthology of his poetry and prose, edited by Alan Bold, who also edited MacDiarmid's Letters and wrote the definitive biography, MacDiarmid. There is a carefully annotated edition of A Drunk man looks at the thistle by Kenneth Buthlay. Scotsoun has produced a number of recordings of the poems.

An ambitious project to publish or republish MacDiarmid's complete works is now in progress, with Alan Riach as general editor.

WR Aitken

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