Thesis--Marburg. / Cover title. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. [vi]-x).

This thesis is an examination of the poetry of Edwin Morgan. It is a cultural analysis of Morgan's poetry as representation of the Scottish people. Morgan's poetry represents the Scottish people as determined and persistent in dealing with life's adversities while maintaining hope in a better future.

This dissertation, Hugh MacDiarmid and Sorley MacLean: Modern Makars, Men of Letters, transcribes and annotates 76 letters (65 hitherto unpublished), between MacDiarmid and MacLean. Four additional letters written by MacDiarmid’s second wife, Valda Grieve, to Sorley MacLean have also been included as they shed further light on the relationship which evolved between the two poets over the course of almost fifty years of friendship. These letters from Valda were archived with the unpublished correspondence from MacDiarmid which the Gaelic poet preserved. The critical introduction to the letters examines the significance of these poets’ literary collaboration in relation to the Scottish Renaissance and the Gaelic Literary Revival in Scotland, both movements following Ezra Pound’s Modernist maxim, “Make it new.” The first chapter, “Forging a Friendship”, situates the development of the men’s relationship in terms of each writer’s literary career, MacDiarmid already having achieved fame through his early lyrics and with the 1926 publication of A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle when they first met. MacLean, on the other hand, was a recent university graduate, young teacher, and fledgling poet when he began to provide translations of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century Gaelic poetry for MacDiarmid to versify in English with the odd Scots or Gaelic word. This assistance was essential to MacDiarmid’s compilation of The Golden Treasury of Scottish Poetry, which he wished to be representative of Scotland’s literary traditions in Scots, Gaelic, English, and Latin. The work resulting from MacDiarmid and MacLean’s literary collaboration further reinforced MacDiarmid’s credibility as a nationalist poet well versed in each of these traditions. Chapter two, “Cultural Nationalism – Politics and Poetry” discusses the significance of each writer’s stance on language in relation to Scottish literature and explores their success in avoiding the ideological antagonisms which plagued the literary and language revivals in early twentieth-century Ireland. “Modern Makars” scrutinizes MacDiarmid and MacLean’s renderings of several Gaelic poems in The Golden Treasury, particularly in relation to the implications of the term “translations”. The final chapter, “Epistolary Discourse and the Legacy of the Letters” sums up the significance of MacDiarmid and MacLean’s collaboration and long-standing friendship, as revealed through their letters, and addresses these writers’ subsequent influence on both writing and cultural life in Scotland. The letters are followed by two appendices. Appendix A includes a transcription of Michael Davitt’s interview with Sorley MacLean for the Irish journal Innti in 1986 wherein MacLean discusses such issues as his political views, the influences on his poetry, and his relationship with MacDiarmid. The interview is provided in its original Irish text and accompanied by a translation into English. Appendix B is a transcription of the Times Literary Supplement’s 4 January 1936 review of MacDiarmid’s translation of The Birlinn of Clanranald as it was originally published in The Modern Scot. Sorley MacLean served as the ghost writer of MacDiarmid’s response to this critique of his work. This research, conducted both here in Victoria and in Edinburgh, Scotland, provides the first book-length study of the literary collaboration of these influential Scottish poets and the first critical discussion of their collected letters.

This dissertation, Hugh MacDiarmid and Sorley MacLean: Modern Makars, Men of Letters, transcribes and annotates 76 letters (65 hitherto unpublished), between MacDiarmid and MacLean. Four additional letters written by MacDiarmid’s second wife, Valda Grieve, to Sorley MacLean have also been included as they shed further light on the relationship which evolved between the two poets over the course of almost fifty years of friendship. These letters from Valda were archived with the unpublished correspondence from MacDiarmid which the Gaelic poet preserved. The critical introduction to the letters examines the significance of these poets’ literary collaboration in relation to the Scottish Renaissance and the Gaelic Literary Revival in Scotland, both movements following Ezra Pound’s Modernist maxim, “Make it new.” The first chapter, “Forging a Friendship”, situates the development of the men’s relationship in terms of each writer’s literary career, MacDiarmid already having achieved fame through his early lyrics and with the 1926 publication of A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle when they first met. MacLean, on the other hand, was a recent university graduate, young teacher, and fledgling poet when he began to provide translations of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century Gaelic poetry for MacDiarmid to versify in English with the odd Scots or Gaelic word. This assistance was essential to MacDiarmid’s compilation of The Golden Treasury of Scottish Poetry, which he wished to be representative of Scotland’s literary traditions in Scots, Gaelic, English, and Latin. The work resulting from MacDiarmid and MacLean’s literary collaboration further reinforced MacDiarmid’s credibility as a nationalist poet well versed in each of these traditions. Chapter two, “Cultural Nationalism – Politics and Poetry” discusses the significance of each writer’s stance on language in relation to Scottish literature and explores their success in avoiding the ideological antagonisms which plagued the literary and language revivals in early twentieth-century Ireland. “Modern Makars” scrutinizes MacDiarmid and MacLean’s renderings of several Gaelic poems in The Golden Treasury, particularly in relation to the implications of the term “translations”. The final chapter, “Epistolary Discourse and the Legacy of the Letters” sums up the significance of MacDiarmid and MacLean’s collaboration and long-standing friendship, as revealed through their letters, and addresses these writers’ subsequent influence on both writing and cultural life in Scotland. The letters are followed by two appendices. Appendix A includes a transcription of Michael Davitt’s interview with Sorley MacLean for the Irish journal Innti in 1986 wherein MacLean discusses such issues as his political views, the influences on his poetry, and his relationship with MacDiarmid. The interview is provided in its original Irish text and accompanied by a translation into English. Appendix B is a transcription of the Times Literary Supplement’s 4 January 1936 review of MacDiarmid’s translation of The Birlinn of Clanranald as it was originally published in The Modern Scot. Sorley MacLean served as the ghost writer of MacDiarmid’s response to this critique of his work. This research, conducted both here in Victoria and in Edinburgh, Scotland, provides the first book-length study of the literary collaboration of these influential Scottish poets and the first critical discussion of their collected letters.

This thesis investigates the representation of social reality that can be reflected by folk belief and the supernatural within mythic worlds created in epic poetry. Although the society, itself, can be regarded as the creator of its own myth, it may still be subjected to the impact of the synthesized mythic world, and this study seeks to address the roles of the society in the shaping of such mythic worlds. The research is inspired by an innovative approach, using James Macpherson’s Ossian (1760-63) and Elias Lönnrot’s Kalevala (1835-49) as epic models that benefit from mythical traditions. Through the examination and the comparison of these two epic collections, both of which seem to have a close association with social reformation and restructuring, the study explores the universality of human nature. It also reveals the extent mythic worlds may exhibit the ‘realities’ of their source-societies and how mythical tradition may become a reflection of a society’s transforming past modes of thinking. Moreover, the study devotes special attention to the influence of mythic heritage on national awakening and the construction of national identities. The research treats Macpherson as the re-inventor of Gaelic oral tradition with his Ossian, where he portrays a Romanticized image of a gallant past according to the norms of the eighteenth century. Therefore, the mythic world of the epic can be seen as a combination of an ancient heroic past and the aesthetic refinement of a polished age. In this framework, as the product of a society going through a transition period from traditional to modern, Ossian seems to reflect the society’s changing world-view, both celebrating, and mourning for a culture on the verge of extinction. Focusing on the Kalevala, the study analyzes its portrayal of Finnish folk belief. The Kalevala, like Ossian, is an attempt to recover ancient tradition, which seems to revolve around supernatural and divine elements, with hopes to establish a common social reality. It is an expression of Finnish language, belief and culture, whose production was prompted by the looming Finnish nationalism. Therefore, the evolving mode of thought represented in the mythic world of Kalevalaic poems, is expected and favoured by the society, enabling the epic to encourage a social reformation.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Glasgow, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references. Print version also available.

Hugh MacDiarmid est considéré comme le poète écossais le plus important du XXᵉ siècle. Il est surtout célébré pour les poèmes lyriques écrits en scots dans les années Vingt et le poème A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, paru en 1926. Les poèmes des années Trente, pour la plupart issus du projet non publié Mature Art, ainsi que In Memoriam James Joyce (1955), ont rarement suscité le même intérêt de la part des critiques à cause de leur caractère fragmentaire. Pourtant, ils représentent l’aboutissement d’une crise stylistique complexe que cette étude se propose d’analyser à travers la question du lien, en particulier du lien problématique. L’œuvre complète dresse le portrait d’une humanité déchirée par les divisions sociales, la trahison et la mort mais évoque aussi une perte, une perte fondamentale et fondatrice de la modernité : la perte de l’altérité transcendante désignée par la figure de Dieu. Une analyse diachronique des poèmes révèle comment l’évolution de l’œuvre poétique de MacDiarmid peut être conçue comme une rupture avec le divin, comme un processus de sécularisation et de déthéologisation. À partir de A Drunk Man, l’instance d’énonciation, les pratiques intertextuelles, et le rythme de l’œuvre se métamorphosent pour permettre l’avènement de listes et de catalogues matérialistes. Grâce à un lexique de l’immanence et grâce à l’imitation de la forme infinie du pibroch, les poèmes dévoilent une philosophie post-chrétienne qui abandonne le principe de fin mais conserve celui de finalité. Les hommes et la poésie demeurent tournés vers une altérité immanente, qu’ils ne peuvent toutefois pas atteindre. Finalement, malgré la souffrance causée par une quête du sens jamais achevée, l’option existentielle du partage dans la nature s’unit au partage que seule l’écriture poétique rend possible, pour inscrire l’œuvre dans la plénitude. / Hugh MacDiarmid is considered the most important Scottish poet of the 20th century. He is mostly celebrated for the Scots lyrics he wrote in the 1920s and his long poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, published in 1926. Because of their fragmentation, the poems of the Thirties, most of which were part of the unpublished project Mature Art, and In Memoriam James Joyce (1955), have not attracted the same critical attention. However, they represent the culmination of a very complex stylistic crisis that this study offers to analyse thanks to the question of bonds, especially problematic bonds. The poetry portrays humanity torn by social division, treason and death, but it deals with loss too, with a fundamental and founding loss for modern men: the loss of God, the embodiment of transcendent otherness. A diachronic analysis of the poems reveals how the transformation of MacDiarmid’s poetry may be understood as a rupture with the divine and as a process of secularisation. From A Drunk Man, the enunciator, the intertextual methods and the rhythm of the poetry change so as to allow the emergence of materialist lists and catalogues. Thanks to immanent terms and to the imitation of the infinite form of the pibroch, the poems display a post-Christian philosophy that abandons the concept of ending but retains that of end (aim). Humanity and poetry are still turned towards an immanent form of otherness, though one which they cannot reach. Finally, despite the pain caused by a never-ending quest for meaning, poetic writing makes serenity possible through the appearance of a vital existential option: sharing.

The purposes of this study were to formulate a definition of the "bob-wheel" stanza in which a number of Middle English and Middle Scots poems were written, to inventory and describe these works, with special attention to the structure of individual stanzas, to identify the genres, the periods, and the dialects in which they were written, and to trace their origin and development between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. The dissertation includes a general introduction of the topic, chapters on the influence of Latin and Romance stanzaic structure, a chronological survey of the bob-wheel poems, and a conclusion in which theories concerning the origins, development, and decline of the form are discussed.

This thesis considers a selection of modern landscape poetry from an ecocritical perspective, arguing that this poetry demonstrates how the term landscape might be re-imagined in relation to contemporary environmental concerns. Each chapter discusses poetic responses to a different kind of landscape: gardens, forests, rivers and islands. Chapter One explores how, in the poetry of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Douglas Dunn, Louise Glück and David Harsent, gardens are culturally constructed landscapes in which ideas of self, society and environment are contemplated; I ask whether gardening provides a positive example of how people might interact with the natural world. My second chapter demonstrates that for Sorley MacLean, W.S. Merwin, Susan Stewart and Kathleen Jamie, forests are sites of memory and sustainable ‘dwelling', but that deforestation threatens both the ecology and the culture of these landscapes. Chapter Three compares river poems by Ted Hughes and Alice Oswald, considering their differing approaches to river sources, mystical immersion in nature, water pollution and poetic experimentation; I discuss how in W.S. Graham's poetry the sea provides a complex image of the phenomenal world similar to Oswald's river. The final chapter examines the extent to which islands in poetry are pastoral landscapes and environmental utopias, looking in particular at poems by Dunn, Robin Robertson, Iain Crichton Smith and Jen Hadfield. I reflect upon the potential for island poetry to embrace narratives of globalisation as well as localism, and situate the work of George Mackay Brown and Robert Alan Jamieson within this context. I engage with a range of ecocritical positions in my readings of these poets and argue that the linguistic creativity, formal inventiveness and self-reflexivity of poetry constitute a distinctive contribution to contemporary understandings of landscape and the environment.