Owen and Sassoon: The Edinburgh Poems

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Nancy Gish (ed.), Hugh MacDiarmid: man and poet (Maine: National Poetry Foundation; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992)

Baderoon explores the traces that people leave in one another’s lives. Here, the speaker looks at an old photograph of her partner taken by his ex-lover and muses about the events that lead to their breakup. On my desk is a photograph of you stanza VIII. For the death stroke, and death halloo...): When the stag turned to bay, the ancient hunter had the perilous task of going in upon, and killing or disabling the desperate animal. At all times the task was dangerous, and to be adventured upon wisely and warily, either by getting behind the stag while he was gazing on the hounds, or by watching an opportunity to gallop roundly in upon him, and kill him with the sword. Graham Tulloch, ‘Robert Garioch’s different styles of Scots’, Scottish Literary Journal 12:1 (1985) P.H. Scott and A.C. Davis, The Age of MacDiarmid: essays on Hugh MacDiarmid and his influence on contemporary Scotland (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1980) stanza XXIX: Though all unask'd his birth or name...): The Highlanders, who carried hospitality to a punctilious excess, are said to have considered it as churlish, to ask a stranger his name or lineage, before he had taken refreshment. Feuds were so frequent among them, that a contrary rule would, in many cases, have produced the discovery of some circumstance, which might have excluded the guest from the benefit of the assistance he stood in need of.

Everyone’s thoughts and emotions turn dark sometimes, and one of the best ways to safely let that negativity out is to read or listen to equally dark subjects. These methods of contemplation allow us achieve catharsis through careful introspection. Best Dark Poems Just as Sassoon is mentioned as having an influence on him, there was a social, cultural [socio-cultural] set in Edinburgh that helped Owen with his ideas and inspiration.” Editor) Honor’d Shade: An Anthology of New Scottish Poetry to Mark the Bicentenary of Robert Burns, W. & R. Chambers, 1959.

Garioch had met Sorley MacLean at Edinburgh University, and poems by both appear in 17 Poems for 6d, published by Garioch (as the Chalmers Press) in early 1940. It wasn’t until 1966 that the Selected Poems appeared, followed by the Collected Poems of 1977, (both published by Macdonald). Robin Fulton updated and revised the latter as Complete Poetical Works in 1983, and also edited a new Collected Poems in 2004. Robin Fulton, ‘Norman MacCaig’, in Contemporary Scottish Poetry: individuals and contexts (Loanhead: Macdonald, 1974)The Revolutionary Art of the Future: rediscovered poems, edited by John Manson, Dorian Grieve and Alan Riach (Manchester: Carcanet, 2003) Almost alone among his contemporaries MacCaig wrote virtually nothing but poems, mostly lyric and mostly short but which cumulatively make up an impressive body of work. Whatever his own views on the matter might have been, he is now considered a major writer. ‘Each [poem] makes, incisively, its point. The affinity, as many have pointed out, is with Herbert and Holub and other great poets of post-war Eastern Europe’ (Angus Calder). Fill'd up the symphony between...): "The harp and clairschoes are now only heard of in the Highlands in ancient song. At what period these instruments ceased to be used, is not on record; and tradition is silent on this head. How it happened that the noisy and inharmonious bagpipe banished the soft and expressive harp, we cannot say; but certain it is, that the bagpipe is now the only instrument that obtains universally in the Highland districts." --Campbell's Journey Through North Britain. London, 1808.' Poems for 6d: In Gaelic, Lowland Scots and English (with Somhairle MacGhill-Eathain) (Edinburgh: Chalmers Press, 1940)

Even for those who are visitors or adoptive citizens, Edinburgh feels like a welcoming and homely city. Scott Lyall, Hugh MacDiarmid’s Poetry and Politics of Place: imagining a Scottish republic (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006) Iain Crichton Smith, ‘The power of craftsmanship: the poetry of Robert Garioch’ in Towards the Human: selected essays (Edinburgh: Macdonald, 1986) stanza XV: The dismal Coronach....): The Coronach of the Highlanders, like the Ululatus of the Romans, and the Ululoo of the Irish, was a wild expression of lamentation poured forth by the mourners over the body of a departed friend. When the words of it were articulate, they expressed the praises of the deceased, and the loss the clan would sustain by his death. The Coronach has for some years past been superseded at funerals by the use of the bagpipe, and that also is, like many other Highland peculiarities, falling into disuse, unless in remote districts.The most difficult thing for me to remember is that a poem is made of words and not of the expanding heart, the overflowing soul, or the sensitive observer. A poem is made of words. … It is brought to life by the reader and takes part in the reader’s change. (‘Notes on a Poetry of Release’) MacCaig was into his thirties before he published two books of poems. These belonged to the Neo-Apocalyptic School, rampant on the ‘Celtic Fringes’ in the 1940s. Later, he disavowed them to the extent that one fancied that only an innate respect for scholarship prevented him destroying the copies lodged in the National Library of Scotland. As that school went, they weren’t bad. He came into his own, though, in his forties, with Riding Lights, published in 1955. At this point he might be, and was, mistaken for a Scottish relative of the Movement. From his earliest childhood onward, he was a ravenous and insatiable reader; his memory was of extraordinary range and tenacity, and of what he read and observed he seemed to have forgotten almost nothing.

Joy Hendry and Raymond Ross (eds), Norman MacCaig: Critical Essays (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990)Christopher Whyte, ‘The poetry of Robert Garioch: more ambition than reduction’ in Marco Fazzini (ed.), Alba Literaria: a history of Scottish literature (Venezia Mestre: Amos Edizioni, 2005) The literary arguments intertwined with crises in MacDiarmid’s personal life. His first wife, Peggy Skinner, left him for a coal merchant. He met his second wife, Valda Trevlyn, and with their young son Michael, went to Shetland in 1933. Here, physical and mental breakdown followed a period of intense isolation, introspection and psychological anxiety. Astonishingly, his greatest poems of the 1930s delivered a way through the crises. ‘Lament for the Great Music’ reconnects with deeper traditions, the classical music of the Highland bagpipe and all that signifies for a multi-layered, complex, tragic, defiant, strengthening, persistent national character. ‘On a Raised Beach’ begins with the poet utterly alone but it ends with the understanding that life is an act of participation in a way the lonely observer could not comprehend.