Emboldened by the success of his 1926 poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, the Scottish poet and critic Christopher Grieve – better known by his pseudonym, Hugh MacDiarmid – set sight on a new creative endeavor, a work that could “glimpse the underlying pattern of human history,” what MacDiarmid called “Cencrastus, the Curly Snake.”Footnote ¹ For MacDiarmid, Cencrastus represented the “Gaelic (or Scottish) version of the idea common to Indian and other mythologies that underlying Creation there is great snake,” a snake symbolic of “the principle of change and the main factor in the revolutionary development of human consciousness, ‘man’s incredible variation’.”Footnote ² If this new work, he thought, could engage “an intricate linguistic apparatus which involves Scottish and Irish Gaelic, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Latin, and Greek,” he might “sing as never Scotsman sang afore,” developing a synthetic style as a “Homage of Consciousness – a paean to creative thought.”Footnote ³ Yet to write this new poem – the poem that became To Circumjack Cencrastus (1930) – proved difficult. Frustrated after nearly four years’ work, MacDiarmid complained to a friend that Cencrastus had not achieved what he “intended – I deliberately deserted my big plan.”Footnote ⁴ While the poem demonstrated “an astonishing knowledge of the whole range of modern European philosophy and religious speculation,” it possessed an “intellectual arrogance,” “pretentious pedantry” and a “super-abundance of needless personalities – scurrilous vilification of great Scotsmen past and present.”Footnote ⁵ Moreover, he argued, Cencrastus had not illuminated what Scottish literature then needed most, he thought, namely a “new classicism” – one that could extend the country’s “national principle of freedom on the plane of world-affairs” while rebalancing “Europe in accordance with [Scotland’s] distinctive genius.”Footnote ⁶

MacDiarmid’s pursuit of a “new classicism” for Scotland was unique from the start: what he desired was not the institutionalized “puerilities, elementary, trifling, schoolboy drilling, and very bad drilling” of nineteenth-century Scottish classical instruction but a form of reception that went well beyond the patriotic vision of antiquity espoused by the Scottish radical John Stuart Blackie (1809–95), professor of Greek at the University of Edinburgh from 1852 to 1882.Footnote ⁷ Blackie, the author of the 1853 essay On the Living Language of the Greeks, had once argued that the Scottish people needed “not new editions of trite Greek plays already edited so often, and tortured so critically, that many a luckless word in them has been put into more antic attitudes” but instead “a scholarship with a large human soul, and a pregnant social significance, which shall not seek with a studious feebleness to avoid, but rather with a generous vigour to find contact with all the great intellectual and moral movements of the age.”Footnote ⁸ As the outlines of MacDiarmid’s vision of nationalism became clear, he built on Blackie’s thought, believing that, if a ‘new’ Scottish classicism did arise, it would engage more intensely with the fraught politics and social movements of the present while also resolving a central problem plaguing Scottish scholars of the previous century. Though many of Scotland’s prominent Victorians were eager to distinguish themselves from “the dry-as-dust, anti-life affair which English classicism was,” the nineteenth-century Scottish reception of antiquity still seemed to have been effectively split.Footnote ⁹ Against a ‘Northern’ expression of idealism – motivated by cultural nationalism and a particularly Scottish stress on “democratic intellectualism” – there emerged an opposing ‘Southern’ principle that accentuated “‘Blood and Culture’, according to which, a system of racial exclusiveness was presented as preferable to the anarchism of Scottish democracy.”Footnote ¹⁰ While Southern scholars, Davie suggested, were keen to amass “out-of-the-way erudition, their Northern counterparts were animated with the purpose of elevating public taste and impressing on the nation at large a respect for classical restraint in the Arts.”Footnote ¹¹ MacDiarmid, in seeking a ‘new classicism’, aimed to merge something from both these impulses, not merely amassing erudition but articulating a democratic ‘public voice’ in his verse as well. Yet, as he sought this, MacDiarmid’s vision of reception was transformed – not only by his auto-didacticism and incendiary politics but by the erosion of classics’ critical position in British society. As classical learning became increasingly dis-embedded both from its central institutional role as a guardian of British imperial interests and increasingly even from its role as a key accelerant in the ‘nation-building’ movements of Celtic revival, MacDiarmid generated a new and more complex vision. Though he had become, by the early 1930s, irritated with the pragmatism of the National Party, MacDiarmid still believed a ‘new classicism’ might emerge as a catalytic force for Scottish interests, one that would fuse together the project of national reinvention with an anti-imperial, global ideology – principally, the communism of V. I. Lenin (1870–1924).Footnote ¹² With this in mind, MacDiarmid turned from the heteroglossic Lallans developed for A Drunk Man to a polyglossic, synthetic English, “a vision of world language.”Footnote ¹³ Born from his admiration of Joyce, this multilingual idiom proved artistically promising, but, as MacDiarmid adumbrated it throughout the 1930s, he was led into increasingly radical forms of stylistic eccentricity and ideological isolation. His new aesthetic engendered a deep solipsism for which his synthetic vernacular became emblematic: MacDiarmid’s ‘global’ idiom was, as Matthew Hart notes, “the speech of no singular person, place, or nation-state.”Footnote ¹⁴ Nonetheless these “private imaginings of a new public discourse” impacted both the range of his poetry and his reputation.Footnote ¹⁵ This eccentric vision of ‘classicism’ untethered MacDiarmid’s work from clear substantive links to the literatures of Greece and Rome, and in so dominating his later work, his penchant for both the idiosyncratic and the incendiary made his poetry a “form of Doric” that was indeed “no dialect in particular.”Footnote ¹⁶

Though frustrated with the failures of Cencrastus, MacDiarmid outlined his “big plan” in a polemical essay he proposed for the pages of T. S. Eliot’s The Criterion.Footnote ¹⁷ Writing to Eliot he asked:

Eliot accepted the proposal, and MacDiarmid later dispatched the essay entitled “English Ascendancy in British Literature.” The piece was published in July 1931, motivated by MacDiarmid’s desire to discuss at some length a recent report on primary education by the London Board of Education. MacDiarmid praised some findings from the Report of the Consultative Committee on the Primary School (1931), especially the new stress laid on the “need to realize that there are many varieties of English; that it is not the function of schools to decry any special or local peculiarities of speech; and that a racy native turn of speech is better than any stilted phraseology, especially for literary purposes.”Footnote ¹⁹ As he saw it, the suggestion that schools not discourage “varieties of English” was a welcome departure from long-established practice and policy in Britain, for from the time of Matthew Arnold only the “narrow ascendancy tradition” of English had been encouraged across public life.Footnote ²⁰ The Elementary Education Acts 1870 to 1893 had notably “made no provision for the teaching of/in anything other than English” so that an entire generation, though “intelligent readers of English,” were “content to ignore Scottish, Irish, and Welsh Gaelic literatures, and Scots Vernacular literature.”Footnote ²¹ Rather than “broad-basing” knowledge of literature through “all the diverse cultural elements and the splendid variety of languages and dialects, on the British Isles,” the public had been systematically confined to the “English central stream” of British literature.Footnote ²² As a result, the British people had heard “but one side of a complicated case” and become victims of what MacDiarmid called “an extensive spiritual and psychological blindness.”Footnote ²³ Yet this new report suggested that distinctions were to be drawn between “local variations” of dialect and the clear incorrect use of standard English among children.Footnote ²⁴

While the report’s recommendations focused largely on dialect, the insistence that certain linguistic variations could develop “freely and easily” gave MacDiarmid hope that the languages of Scotland, Ireland and Wales might perhaps someday enjoy greater recognition.Footnote ²⁶ Like English dialects these languages were “products of substantially the same environment, and concerned for the most part with the same political, psychological, and practical issues, the same traditions and tendencies, the same landscapes, as poets in English.”Footnote ²⁷ Yet they were often ignored or dismissed as “valuably complementary” to the central stream of English expression.Footnote ²⁸ As MacDiarmid saw it, however, their “ancient technique” provided a “corrective” to contemporary English, for

Though Britain still possessed these elements within the wider range of its literary culture, the “narrow ascendancy tradition” had shut forms of Welsh, Gaelic and Scots vernacular literature out, keeping the more salubrious cultural influences of the Celtic far from the collective imagination.Footnote ³⁰

The report did provide hope, but MacDiarmid felt that the Celtic languages still faced threats on many sides, not least the various attempts to standardize “‘correct English’” as an International Auxiliary Language (IAL), a movement that in the wake of the First World War had gained greater favor among some prominent intellectuals, linguists and politicians.Footnote ³¹ Led by Cambridge University critics C. K. Ogden (1889–1957) and I. A. Richards (1893–1979), advocates of “Basic English” felt that if language could be simplified and stripped largely of its idiomatic characteristics, then English might be made a more effective mode of international communication.Footnote ³² Since the Armistice of 1918, Ogden and Richards had pushed for the development of a condensed English, believing that the continued prosperity of postwar Europe depended to some extent on the deployment of a secondary tongue, or common interlanguage, which could more easily traverse national boundaries of language and culture.Footnote ³³ “The so-called national barriers of today are ultimately language barriers,” Ogden declared in 1931,

In combatting the problem of ‘Babel’ in Europe, “‘Basic English for all’” offered to do the work that Latin was thought to have once accomplished as the dominant tongue of political, academic and religious discourse – albeit without demanding “the faith of a fanatic” for Rome’s dead language.Footnote ³⁵ Though it comprised only 850 words, Ogden insisted that Basic could “meet the universal demand for a compact and efficient technological medium” of speech.Footnote ³⁶ Complex problems of translation mitigated, ‘Basic’ linguistic exchange could steer nations clear of threats to the

Moreover, as they envisioned it, the language would not be imposed upon any people but would rather come “into use freely, as a general convenience, under the urge of the everyday motives of mankind,” for as Anglophone countries grew in power and global prestige, English too had become far more pervasive.Footnote ³⁸ For Ogden and Richards, “Standard English” had been so “enriched and cosmopolitanized,” especially “through the expansion of modern science,” that the spread of its more Basic form might forge greater global understanding and combat claims of a new linguistic imperialism.Footnote ³⁹

On a popular level, the desire to see idiomatic English debrided, to see its dialects condensed to the most basic and ‘standard’ of components, had already had a broad impact, especially in West End theatres of the postwar period.Footnote ⁴⁰ The notion, espoused by Ogden and Richards, that English was an efficient “Universal medium” for the swift communication of ideas had been, in a crude way, advanced across the daily criticism of London drama throughout the 1920s.Footnote ⁴¹ A less literary and less artificial English – an English marked by lack of dialect, accent or artifice – was thought more appealing, better for the understanding of general audiences than anything too experimental. Driven by an aversion for “ornate literary stuff,” St. John Ervine (1883–1971) – the Ulster-born playwright and Unionist – had thus discouraged dialect in theatre, dismissing as “contrived” and “withdrawn from reality” the recent drama of Ireland and England.Footnote ⁴² Such “‘literary drama’” was, he asserted, “generally full of stiff sentences that have more resemblance to the language used in editorial articles and ‘middles’ printed in the weekly reviews than to the language used in conversation.”Footnote ⁴³ The especial “business” of the modern playwright was, he believed, “to write dialogue which shall have the look of literature and the sound of the street: it must have the similitude of ordinary conversation and, at the same time, be attractive and compact and shapely.”Footnote ⁴⁴ As such, dialect that was not “selected and shapely” could perhaps become an impediment to effective dramatic speech, an obstruction, Ervine thought, both to the clear communication of a playwright’s “ideas and intentions” and to the commercial success of theatre itself.Footnote ⁴⁵ His critique – elaborated across a series of reviews he wrote for The Observer in February 1931 – drew out MacDiarmid’s scorn. Ervine had declared “[a]nything that makes oral communication difficult … essentially evil.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Citing the amateur linguist Richard Paget (1869–1955), he insisted that, though English was “a wild growth” with its “learned words … a potpourri compounded of hedgerow flowers – Greek and Latin,” its speech could be tamed and “made more useful by conscious effort on our part.”Footnote ⁴⁷ To develop a plainer idiom, Ervine encouraged actors and writers to read Reference PagetPaget’s 1930 treatise Babel, or The Past, Present, and Future of Human Speech, specifically for its methods on making English a “flexible instrument for communication” across the globe.Footnote ⁴⁸ English was to be standardized through “systematic and scientific study … with a view to its future improvement” even if the “great majority of the literary world at present” still believed that “the fate of our language ought properly to be left to chance, or rather to herd instinct.”Footnote ⁴⁹ As Paget saw it, artists and writers fond of this “comfortable policy” – this “laissez-faire” approach to linguistic development – were wrong; it was not “practicable to-day, for the fate of English speech is in the balance.”Footnote ⁵⁰ “If we do nothing,” he exclaimed, “one thing will be likely to happen, namely, that the English language will break up – America going one way, Australia another, and so on, till in the end these different communities will no longer be able to understand one another.”Footnote ⁵¹ In this moment of apparent crisis, there were, however, unique opportunities as well, for already “[b]roadcasting, long-distance telephony, the talking film, and the gramophone” had conspired to make better forms of “standardization possible, and even comparatively easy to establish.”Footnote ⁵² New technological media could indeed provide a “unifying influence,” allowing language to overcome the more tribal and fractious impulses of human socialization.Footnote ⁵³ The scientific precision of a more universal English was within grasp, he thought, but “only by systematic and conscious effort” would there be “unity and an approach to perfection in the future,” an approach that would fulfill the “words of Genesis,” that there be “‘one language – and now nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do’.”Footnote ⁵⁴

Eager to advance Paget’s vision, Ervine promoted the notion that “[c]lear speech and strong speech and fine speech” was not merely an aesthetic preference but a political imperative of great importance.Footnote ⁵⁵ English had already, he thought, fast become an “exact and simple” tongue, and indeed it was that very “simplicity” that had made it “peculiarly suitable to be a world-language.”Footnote ⁵⁶ On that account alone, he claimed, the continued existence (to say nothing of revivals) of other dialect forms and “obsolete languages” across the British Isles served no useful purpose.Footnote ⁵⁷ The surviving traces of Goedelic and Brythonic tongues in Scotland, Ireland and Wales had done little, he felt, to further the “first principle of speech, that its use is to make us clearly understand each other.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Echoing to some extent the criticism of Irish that Mahaffy once leveled, Ervine mocked

For Ervine, the desire to preserve a diversity of languages was tantamount to warding off “the day when all men will be able to understand each other,” a time when simply English alone would provide plain-spoken understanding between culturally different peoples.Footnote ⁶⁰ No longer could language then be exploited for artificial, “sophisticated” aims – the putting on of so-called “literary airs” – but rather “for its purpose, the understanding of each other, and not the preservation of quaintness or the indulgence of literary idiosyncrasies.”Footnote ⁶¹

Hugh MacDiarmid vilified the Anglophilia of Ervine’s universal “world-language.”Footnote ⁶² Denouncing his criticism, MacDiarmid insisted that Ervine had not simply abandoned advocacy for Gaelic languages in Britain but had willingly betrayed his homeland in Ulster as well. Rather than write an English idiom inflected by local dialects of the North, he had chosen to defend the commercial theatre of the bourgeoisie instead, supporting poor, digestible drawing-room comedies focused almost entirely on “winning the London success, and international vogue of a kind, denied to his earlier and better work.”Footnote ⁶³ Robbed of its Ulster English, Ervine’s drama had fallen victim to the same “sorry imperialism which has thrust Gaelic and dialect literatures outwith the pale and concentrated on what has become to use Sir William Watson’s phrase, ‘scriptive English’.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Contrary to Ervine, MacDiarmid believed that as English slowly became “more and more of a world-language,” the language was “progressively useless for higher literary purposes.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Without the corrective pressures brought by Scottish, Welsh and Irish literatures, English had become a “far less concentrated and expressive language.”Footnote ⁶⁶ British literature needed, he argued, not only strong infusions from a variety of local English dialects, but those Gaelic, Scots vernacular and Welsh literary traditions that had been “virtually proscribed by the ‘English Ascendancy’ policy.”Footnote ⁶⁷ If even Scots alone had been “concurrently maintained with the development of ‘English Literature’,” he speculated

Nonetheless, in light of the suggestions by the Board of Education, there seemed to be a greater openness to the possibility of better synthesis between the “diverse cultural elements and the splendid variety of languages and dialects, in the British Isles.”Footnote ⁶⁹ The “children of tomorrow,” MacDiarmid observed, might yet be relieved of that “subtle but far-reaching psychological outrage which has been inflicted on many generations of pupils and seriously affected the quality and direction of those of them who had literary inclinations.”Footnote ⁷⁰

Relief had already begun to appear in Ireland where the Irish language and literature were experiencing something of an unexpected resurgence in popularity and prestige. During the late nineteenth century, MacDiarmid noted,

This revitalization of an Irish “classical tradition” had not come about, however, through imitating or adapting the literatures of Greek or Roman antiquity: there had been no need to replicate either its forms or its content, for Irish Gaelic, MacDiarmid insisted, possessed an “alternative value of prime consequence when set against the Greek and Roman literatures which are all that most of us mean when we speak of ‘the Classics’.”Footnote ⁷² As MacDiarmid saw it, the meaning of ‘Classics’ had been grossly misinterpreted by poets and artists throughout the European Renaissance. In mimicking the formal trappings of Greek and Roman art, that which was in fact unique and ‘classical’ in their own native literatures had been filtered through false international standards. The canons of such neoclassicism, allegedly derived from Greece and Rome, were not classical in any sense but only imitative and productive of arid reformulations of antiquity. Citing Daniel Corkery’s study, The Hidden Ireland (1924), MacDiarmid declared that “Renaissance standards” were clearly “not Greek standards. Greek standards in their own time and place were standards arrived at by the Greek nation; they were national standards.”Footnote ⁷³ “Caught up at second hand into the art-mind of Europe,” Greek principles were acclaimed universal, and under their influence “the youthfully tender national cultures of Europe” slowly atrophied.Footnote ⁷⁴ The “standards of a dead nation” thus overwhelmed and “killed” the native genius of many latent ‘classical’ traditions in Europe.Footnote ⁷⁵ Those “aptitudes through which they themselves had become memorable” were, bit by bit, washed away in largely botched efforts to imitate and “re-discover the secret power that lay behind Greek art.”Footnote ⁷⁶ That power was never retrieved, MacDiarmid felt, and all attempts at doing so had produced only the “sham strength,” “uneasy energy” and “death in life” of “mere neo-classical” formalism.Footnote ⁷⁷

Although imitations of the Greek and the Roman had helped snuff out forms of “national art” across Europe, MacDiarmid thought contemporary Scottish writers could challenge English dominance and break down its “limited channels” with a “new classicism today.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Scottish classicism, however, could not be born of neoclassical rigor nor of mere nostalgia for the Celtic past. On the contrary, the country had to “get down to Ur-motives – to get back behind the Renaissance” if it were to “undo that deplorable whitewashing whereby Greek and Latin culture has prevented other European nations realizing their national genius in the way Greece and Rome themselves did.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Rather than ape a foreign tradition, Scottish writers needed to do for their place, their time, what “Greece and Rome themselves” had achieved in their own.Footnote ⁸⁰ In this endeavor MacDiarmid felt Ireland’s recent Literary Revival was instructive. While the reputedly Gaelic “values” prized by Yeats and others were, he confessed, “largely phoney and based on misunderstanding and falsification,” the “Celtic Twilight” had provided “probably the only way at first to get even a modicum of Gaelic culture across in an overwhelmingly hostile environment. It succeeded in doing so and led on to the genuine article.”Footnote ⁸¹ That genuine article was to be found not only in the apparent revival of the Irish language but also in new “re-translations” of Irish poetry that stressed not “the stars and shadows of Yeats” but the “hard realism and sharp satire” of Gaelic literature.Footnote ⁸² Yet, even with the gains made in Ireland, Scotland was

For too long Scottish poets had been focused on composing work in English and thus neglected an “all-in view of the literary production of our country.”Footnote ⁸⁴ A “mere subsidiary to English letters,” Scottish literary culture had produced no seemingly “first-class work, indispensable or even relevant to the main line of English literary evolution.”Footnote ⁸⁵ To escape this “creatively inferior” position, poets had to cut through the “crust of imitation” to manifest Scotland’s “potentialities of incalculable difference.”Footnote ⁸⁶

Though recent Scottish writing had been too “‘hit and miss’ and unscientific” to advance a “renewed manifestation” of the classics in Scotland, MacDiarmid nonetheless set forth three conditions for a broad cultural renaissance.Footnote ⁸⁷ First, the “rising tide of Scottish national consciousness” had to grow to greater heights: for too long, he argued, the central differences between the English and the Scottish imagination had been obscured by the “increasing Anglicization of the latter” even though Scotland’s “assimilation to the English” had never been effective or complete.Footnote ⁸⁸ Many “deep-seated and unalterable psychological differences remain,” he argued, “Only the ‘surface minds’ (in the Bergsonian sense) of the Scots have been Englished.”Footnote ⁸⁹ For that reason, it seemed possible – as a second condition – that the formal education at Scottish institutions could be recentered on the study of native literature. “No other people in the world,” he argued,

According to MacDiarmid, this “thorough-going reconcentration” would help spread an “all-in view of Scottish poetry,” not a “hopelessly one-sided” view but one that would see Scotland foster and maintain its own “separate literary tradition.”Footnote ⁹¹ To an extent, some of the groundwork for meeting these two conditions was already developing: the National Party was founded in June 1928, and as such the nationalist movement slowly began to gain better organization and wider public recognition. Its establishment brought together previously separated associations and political interest groups, and in so doing, forced these once “somewhat remote, residually cultural organization[s]” to generate a more concrete ideological platform with clear political objectives.Footnote ⁹² Despite these developments, however, no advent of a renaissance in Scotland could survive, MacDiarmid thought, without mending the radical division of Scottish languages. “The third point,” he suggested therefore, was

As he saw it, if contemporary writers were to somehow fuse together Scotland’s disseminated tongues, ranging from Highland Gaelic through varieties of Lallans, then they might “lead the way in the great new movement in poetry which is everywhere being sought for.”Footnote ⁹⁴ To “effectively bridge this Gaelic-Scots gulf,” however, was a unique challenge, not least because the number of fluent speakers of Scottish Gaelic had been gradually diminishing for well over a century.Footnote ⁹⁵ In 1891 more than 250,000 people spoke the language, but only forty years later that number had dropped precipitously: the British census of 1941 reported less than 130,000 speakers.Footnote ⁹⁶ As Scottish Gaelic slowly became a cultural curiosity from a once Celtic past, its idiom also was said to have been “choked by an excessive formalism.”Footnote ⁹⁷ By contrast, most varieties of Lowland Scots faced no threat of extinction, yet their parochial reputation preceded discussion of Lallans serving the national interest. Lack of standardization and a “formlessness” reigned over its twentieth-century writing.Footnote ⁹⁸ Unfit for literary use, Scots had “gradually lost all the qualities befitting them for major expressive purposes rather than for homely, local uses.”Footnote ⁹⁹ With the dialects of one language disseminated so widely and the other strangled with a slavish stress on form, English made inroads in a Scotland “miserably attenuated and driven underground by external factors.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Still MacDiarmid believed the “role of our race in history – the special qualities and functions of Scottish nationality” could be articulated in a unifying national language with “necessary dynamic force.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ There would be no nostalgic return to Scottish Gaelic nor indeed a “puerile” retreat to the parochial – “prevalent conceptions” of Scottish language were “all out of date” and had to change, he thought; what was needed was the innovation of a new synthetic vernacular, a flexible idiom that could then merge various Scots dialects with Scottish Gaelic.Footnote ¹⁰² Only by bridging this gulf – by forging a new sense of Scottish hybridity – would a “new classicism” begin to take shape.Footnote ¹⁰³ Advocates of Home Rule, notably Ruaraidh Erskine of Mar, had argued that Scots vernacular possessed no literary merit, that Highland Gaelic alone was fit for national purpose, but MacDiarmid insisted that a new vernacular could be forged if “all the disjecta membra of the Doric” were worked “back from the bits to the whole” through a “synthetic process.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ This remaking of Scots was no ploy to animate further literary provincialism. Scottish letters had already had enough of “Doric infantilism” with its “instinctive suspicion of cleverness and culture.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ What was needed was not further “mental inertia,” he argued, but an idiom that embraced “all progressive and creative tendencies” present in modern literature and forced Scottish poets from their “anti-cultural prejudices,” the

MacDiarmid derived his experimental vision for Scots in large part from Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), but it was also the Landsmål movement – perhaps Arne Garborg’s Odyssevskvædet, a Nynorsk verse translation of The Odyssey (1918) – which first showed him a synthetic language of national scope.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ With the publication of “The Watergaw” in 1922, MacDiarmid began his own unique renovation of the Doric, and its growing “evolutionary momentum” would see him, over the next four years, “think himself back” into its spirit across three collections of synthetic poetry: Sangschaw (1925), Penny Wheep (1926) and, finally, his landmark long poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926).Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Composed in 2,685 lines, A Drunk Man was a “gallimaufry,” a satirical patois steeped in polyglot intrusions from other European languages.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The work’s linguistic heterogeneity, he claimed, “pit in a concrete abstraction / My country’s contrair qualities,” what the critic G. Gregory Smith (1865–1932) had called “the Caledonian antisyzygy,” the “zigzag of contradictions” and “sudden jostling of contraries” at work in the modern Scot.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Its “polemical restlessness” set out with some belligerence the “latent potentialities” of “distinctive Scots psychology.”Footnote ¹¹¹ “(To prove my saul is Scots,” MacDiarmid declared,

Though he thought his work had drawn on Scotland’s “common trough,” MacDiarmid’s ‘synthesis’ did not fare well commercially, and A Drunk Man was met with some vociferous, critical reviews.Footnote ¹¹³ Some considered it sloppy, confusing and peculiar – “It is idle to attempt a coherent account of a poem so deliberately and provocatively incoherent” – while others castigated MacDiarmid for the “constant plangent grieving over his inhibitions.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Nonetheless, the poem had many early admirers, among them the Irish writer and ancient Greek enthusiast Oliver St John Gogarty, (who lauded A Drunk Man for its “wonderfully flexible and containing form”) and the poet Edwin Muir (who praised its “instinctive rightness”).Footnote ¹¹⁵ “The form of the present poem,” Muir observed,

Yet Muir also detected “frequent carelessness of style” in A Drunk Man, a “hasty, slipshod manner,” which suggested, perhaps, that this artificial fusion of dialects could not be sustained as a shared language across Scottish literature.Footnote ¹¹⁷ “Hugh M‘Diarmid,” he later asserted,

According to Muir, MacDiarmid’s experiments with synthetic language, however intriguing, were “an isolated phenomenon” unsuited to creating a “complete and homogeneous Scottish literature.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ The “landscape” of its literary world “is not noticeably diversified with poets chanting in synthetic Scots”; he explained: “the village bards who have excruciated us for so long still calmly proceed on their traditional way.”Footnote ¹²⁰ To have “a complete and homogeneous” literature, writers had to choose “a complete and homogeneous language,” either Gaelic or English: “There seems to me to be no choice except for these: no half-way house if Scotland is ever to reach its complete expression in literature.”Footnote ¹²¹ Although the country once possessed a vernacular in which “everything can be expressed that a people wishes to express … we cannot return to it,” Muir insisted, “to think so is to misunderstand history.”Footnote ¹²² By the time Robert Burns (1759–96) began composing in Scots poetry, the vernacular was said to have already “lost its richness and thinned to a trickle. It could express feeling, but not sustained thought.”Footnote ¹²³ Dispersed as a variety of provincial dialects, the vernacular had become “what the babbling of children is to the speech of grown men and women; it is blessedly ignorant of the wider spheres of thought and passion, and when it touches upon them its response is as irresponsible as that of the irremediably immature.”Footnote ¹²⁴ Doubtful that Scottish Gaelic provided a better alternative, Muir saw English as the “only practicable” choice for the country.Footnote ¹²⁵ “This may be a regrettable fact, but it must be accepted,” he explained, “for there is no Scots language to which we can pass over from the restricted and local province of dialect: there is only English.”Footnote ¹²⁶ There was no present impediment to a national literature, he maintained: the country had simply to “assert its identity” in English following after “the contemporary case of Ireland.”Footnote ¹²⁷ “Irish nationality cannot be said to be any less intense than ours,” he explained, “but Ireland produced a national literature not by clinging to Irish dialect, but by adopting English and making it into a language fit for all its purposes. The poetry of Mr Yeats belongs to English literature, but no one would deny that it belongs to Irish literature pre-eminently and essentially.”Footnote ¹²⁸ Yeats’ example had demonstrated clearly that, even with the strictures of English, new and appropriate forms of expression could be found to express a variety of ‘Celtic identities’ on the British Isles. The tragedy of contemporary Scottish writing lay, as Muir saw it, not in any failure to revive Gaelic or reimagine Scots but with those who clung mulishly to the “bits and patches” of fading dialects while ignoring the precedent of the Irish Revival.Footnote ¹²⁹

MacDiarmid abhorred the “absurd pro-English prejudice” of Muir’s “sudden attack,” his “stab-in-the-back” betrayal.Footnote ¹³⁰ He proclaimed him an enemy of Scotland, viciously casting doubt on the Orcadian’s national loyalty and critical skill:

For MacDiarmid, Muir’s insistence that remaking Scots was a “petty provincial fad” was tantamount to a “wholesale attack” on both his poetic idiom and the national aspirations of Scotland.Footnote ¹³² Muir’s “contemptuous dismissal” simply reflected a characteristically “English inability to tolerate anything that does not ‘do pujah’ to themselves. It is this inordinate English ascendancy policy,” MacDiarmid complained, “that has determined all their history, and accounts for their ruthless treatment of Irish and Scottish and Welsh Gaelic, the Scots vernacular, and their own dialects.”Footnote ¹³³ Yet such a “snobbish English Tendency,” he argued, had certain key facts wrong, for

Furthermore, the examples Muir had offered of Yeats and the Irish Revival were equally mistaken, not least because Yeats himself “was an enthusiastic supporter of the Lallans movement and used to go about reciting certain Lallans lyrics which he greatly admired and had memorised.”Footnote ¹³⁵ Moreover, “the whole Celtic Twilight business” had at best, he claimed, “only tinkered with the fringes” of an authentic renaissance in Celtic literature, perhaps even “dodging … the issue.”Footnote ¹³⁶ No new reign of classicism in Irish literature had emerged from the behest of Yeats’ literary politics, MacDiarmid argued, and the poet himself had admitted as much, having often confessed profound disappointment with Revival-era writing, writing that spoke in the

For MacDiarmid, Yeats had recognized too late the need for a “Gaelic classical tradition,” a tradition forged not with “fine-spun, tenuous, shadowy stuff” – the “accepted products” of Revival – but with a “distinctive Irish-English,” a hard, hybrid idiom whose “variety” and “virility” could “get back, through the twilight, to the Gaelic sunshine.”Footnote ¹³⁸

By the time his fierce debate with Muir took place, however, MacDiarmid’s incendiary approach to art, life and politics had already embroiled him in significant turmoil of both a political and a personal nature. By the early 1930s his thirteen-year marriage to Margaret Grieve, née Skinner, was disintegrating as broader support for his involvement in the nationalist movement was evaporating as well.Footnote ¹³⁹ In spring 1933 John MacDonald MacCormick (1904–61), secretary for the Council of the National Party, notified him that the party had declined his renewal of membership.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ MacDiarmid’s desire to use “the National Party as a means of introducing Communism into Scotland,” his penchant for preaching “from the Nationalist platform Scots Communism, Republicanism etc.,” was, MacCormick explained, “completely at variance with the Policy of the National Party,” and so by a vote of fifty-five against thirty-eight, MacDiarmid was deemed a political isolate, ineligible for renewed membership.Footnote ¹⁴¹ His strong left-wing sympathies as well as his propensity to savage any opponent were considered too great a liability for the National Party’s plan to merge with the more conservative, more unionist Scottish Party led by John Kevan MacDowall (1891–1958). As MacCormick put it, MacDiarmid was “politically one of the greatest handicaps with which any national movement could have been burdened.”Footnote ¹⁴²

MacDiarmid, in reaction, poured his venom into a series of Scots verses, mocking ‘King John’ MacCormick and his band of moderate Home Rule enthusiasts. That “troupe of gibbering lunatics” had convinced him that there was “nae ither country ’neath the sun / That’s betrayed the human spirit as Scotland’s done, / And still the betrayal proceeds to the complete / Dehumanisin’ o’ the Scottish breed.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Ostracized, he felt that “Nae man, nae spiritual force, can live / In Scotland lang,” and so he encouraged his contemporaries to disavow the National Party:

In remaking his own world – his political and aesthetic vision as well as his domestic world – MacDiarmid sought isolation and self-imposed exile, moving with his Cornish companion Valda Trevlyn (1906–89) to Whalsay in summer 1933. The “Outer Isles,” exclaimed Ezra Pound, “How the hell you are ever to find out anything in Outer Isles with nothing but the shit of Fleet Street and the Pooping of McFarty and Co. governing 96% of British printing kzrrist alone xknoze.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Despite Pound’s exasperation at this move – he risked becoming, like Basil Bunting (1900–85) off on the Canary Islands, “no more central” Pound warned – MacDiarmid remained on Whalsay for nearly nine years, his imagination kindled by the strange visual character of the Shetland and Faroes’ ‘stone’ worlds.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Its “impression of barrenness and monotony” was deceptive, for in radiating a “very moderate aspect,” its apparent “absence of variety of colour and form and the landscape, however different to that which one been accustomed, has its own completeness and complexity.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Its “Deictic, fiducial stones” engendered something of a creative renewal, and thus MacDiarmid began experimenting with a “synthetic English – not Scots,” a new, more multilingual ‘world’ language that ‘got’ into

Moving beyond the Doric of A Drunk Man and Cencrastus, he brought his “aesthesis in vain to bear” on Whalsay, retrieving many languages, living and extinct, to make a ‘learnèd’ poetry of “kindred form … Alpha and Omega, the Omnific Word. These stones have the silence of supreme creative power.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰ He became “an angle-titch to all” the stones’ “corrugations and coigns,” and as his interest in linguistic hybridization grew further, MacDiarmid began to insist that a new poetics of world language might, in fact, give voice to forms of genius present in all literatures and nationalities.Footnote ¹⁵¹ In juxtaposing “alternative value(s) of prime consequence,” poetry – perhaps the mind itself, MacDiarmid suggested – could be unshackled from “our helpless submission to a fraction of our expressive possibilities.”Footnote ¹⁵² “[D]espite minor differences,” all restrictive forms of dialect and standardized language, he explained,

The “particular habits of intellection” encouraged by industrial capitalism and the concomitant dominance of English had choked the public with “incrustations” masked with the names of thought and reason, for “what we call ‘thought’,” he explained, “is generally only ‘rationalism’ of our preconceived or inherent prejudices, or limitations, conscious or unconscious, of our powers of thought to suit our interests.”Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Drawing on the metaphysics of Bergson, MacDiarmid argued that the “misleading superficial ‘crusts’” of prejudice had to be “broken through to release the dynamic spirit which has no more to do with these incrustations than a running stream has to do with a layer of ice which forms on its surface.”Footnote ¹⁵⁵ To unleash this kind of dynamism, one had to seek le mot libre, a “‘freedom of speech’ in the real meaning of the term – something completely opposed to our language habits and freely utilising not only all the vast vocabulary these automatically exclude, but illimitable powers of word formation in keeping with the free genius of any language.”Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Thus, in contrast to the Basic English encouraged by Ogden and Richards, MacDiarmid felt that no adequate ‘world’ language could take the shape of rudimentary, seemingly straightforward intercultural communication. On the contrary, given the sheer diversity of language and literatures, only a difficult synthetic medium could resist the ‘imperial’ or broad ‘ascendancy’ model of international language, one which would see a single language feign translation of all human cultures, nationalities and knowledge through its idiom.

While MacDiarmid’s vision for this collective medium was more literary, its politics more expressly aesthetic, he drew on parallel, practical models of ‘Interlanguage’, especially those advanced by contemporaneous communist thinkers in Britain. One was the suffragette and anti-fascist agitator E. Sylvia Pankhurst (1882–1960), whose 1926 book Delphos: The Future of International Language bemoaned that “language-barriers” still obstructed the “desire for world-friendship long latent amongst the kindlier and wiser people of all nations, and now quickened to an ardent flame by the agonies of the World-war.”Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Pankhurst believed, nonetheless, that the cause of “world-friendship” could be helped, in part, by developing an international “Interlanguage,” if such a tongue could indeed “provide the greatest possible intelligibility: therefore it must reach the widest possible internationality.”Footnote ¹⁵⁸ In no way could it be characterized as global if other distinctively national modes of expression were eradicated through the official imposition of a more ‘basic’ form.

According to Pankhurst, no national tongue could be especially equitable serving as a “world auxiliary” language: to encourage global prosperity, the Interlanguage had to emerge from “definite scientific principles,” the “general consensus of world philological opinion” and not forms of political and linguistic aggression.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ To this end she promoted endowing “interlanguage research” and establishing “[c]hairs of synthetic philology … in all universities.”Footnote ¹⁶¹ Far from antagonizing existing national languages, the Interlanguage would operate “much like Latin,” the “master-key to the most universally employed of the great speech-families” and would engender “a readier and deeper understanding” of many national tongues.Footnote ¹⁶² Employed in separate fields of human endeavor, national and international language could therefore work in harmony, she argued, their knowledge together doing much to “accelerate the spread of learning and the breaking down of social barriers.”Footnote ¹⁶³

MacDiarmid felt likewise: a synthetic ‘world’ language would not threaten parochial idioms or diminish the importance of national literary expression. On the contrary, its essential quality would be its sheer complexity, its ability to house the exceptional character of all literatures while creating a “vivid sense” of their “very different historical, psychological and practical affiliations.”Footnote ¹⁶⁵ These polyglossic aspirations moved MacDiarmid beyond heteroglossia, synthesizing not dialects of the same tongue but the very ‘classical’ essences drawn from “the whole range of welt-literatur” and its forms of “many-sided knowledge.”Footnote ¹⁶⁶ For MacDiarmid, no conflict existed between this vision and the nationalist ambitions of his early verse, for “the Communist Party of Great Britain,” he noted, was “the only party which has the restoration to Scotland of a Parliament of its own as a plank in its platform.”Footnote ¹⁶⁷ More than any other progressive party, Communist Britain understood that Scotland “with its splendid old Radical and Left Wing tendency” had an essential role to play in a “United Front against Fascism and War,” for if the country were to “pull its full weight on the side of Peace and the Commonwealth of Mankind at this great turning-point in human history,” then the “possibility of the development of the Scottish culture” might be more fully ensured.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ While a certain “fascisising pseudo-satisfaction” – that of Oswald Mosley (1896–1980) and the British Union of Fascists – was on the rise, even among some Scottish nationalists, MacDiarmid considered his “adequate synthetic medium” an essential way by which human consciousness might be freed from the bonds that had long “cribbed, cabbined, confined” expression among the disenfranchised and impoverished.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Its idiom could help throw off “the bias given to human mentality by economic, political, religious, and other factors (including above all the vis inertia),” thus fulfilling Lenin’s dictum that communism “must not abandon the old.”Footnote ¹⁷⁰ “Communism,” he had declared – in remarks MacDiarmid fondly repeated –

However marginal a country’s wealth, military power or global prestige might be, each “nation, once fully realised on its own terms” could articulate its political genius and aesthetic potential free from imperial forms of interference, whether such forms were officially imposed or culturally inherited.Footnote ¹⁷²

Given such influence, it is of little surprise that MacDiarmid hoped to wean ‘classicism’ and the ‘classical’ off abstract principles drawn from Greek and Roman civilization. Imitating or conforming to a kind of marmoreal, or neoclassical, reception of antiquity would inevitably limit vital expressions of contemporary national culture. “I have,” he explained,

Despite these aspirations, however, Hugh MacDiarmid was no trained linguist. Christopher Grieve had come into the world with few social or educational advantages, having been raised by working-class parents in the mill town of Langholm. He had little exposure to the classics or even to contemporary European languages in his schooling at Langholm Academy. When he did move to Edinburgh in 1908 to train as a teacher at Broughton Junior Student Center – an institution whose curriculum was said to include the “Liberal Arts subjects – English, Languages, Maths, Science, History, Classics, Geography and Art” – the instruction he received was little more than basic.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Nonetheless, MacDiarmid continued to associate a certain creative magnetism (as well as his own frustration, sexual and otherwise) with the presence of classics, Greek in particular. He wrote later how

MacDiarmid left Broughton without receiving a certificate to qualify him as a teacher. He was glad of it, though, it seems, for he did not want to become institutionalized by the “Scottish teaching profession,” by those “hopeless Safety-Firsters … conscienceless agents of the Powers-that-Be” who continually bend “the knee to Baal in this connexion or that, or grovelling together, obliged, in order to secure their jobs, to tout and belly-crawl.”Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Grieve’s failures with formal schooling, however, only emboldened his belief that Scotland’s guardian institutions remained irrepressibly Anglicized and British; they were therefore not suited to the educational needs of the more ‘authentic’ Scottish student, a student he considered not unlike himself. From a young age he had “an unusual readiness of speech,” “a fluency in the use of a very extensive vocabulary,” which later helped him become an ardent autodidact.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ MacDiarmid’s profound self-regard often saw him preen:

MacDiarmid’s “pugnacious pride” about his learnedness masked, as Scott Lyall suggests, an “insecurity as to the absence of an institutional basis for such learning,” but, however much he fretted about his own lack of formal instruction, MacDiarmid took a decidedly dim view of the “Scottish Educational System as a whole,” believing it had “been utterly de-Scoticized and adapted in the most shocking fashion to suit the exigencies of English Imperialism and the Capitalist system.”Footnote ¹⁷⁹ For that reason, in part, he felt that his “interest in welt-literatur,” his own half-read exposure to many languages and literatures, was more than enough to carry synthetic verse “much further than it has yet been carried by anyone else known to me.”Footnote ¹⁸⁰

As MacDiarmid pushed ahead with his synthetic experiments, he began composing in 1937 a sprawling poem, Cornish Heroic Song for Valda Trevlyn, dedicated to his second wife.Footnote ¹⁸¹ Drawing on “corrective” ‘classical’ values from literatures past and present, MacDiarmid no longer sought, as he had done for Scots, simply “a form of Doric which is no dialect in particular” but a “new literary language” drawn from many expressions of human speech.Footnote ¹⁸² In so doing, however, he felt himself at odds with, if not a rival of, the prior examples of Celtic revival and nationalist renaissance, especially the example of Yeats and the Irish Literary Revival.Footnote ¹⁸³ As Hart has noted, MacDiarmid’s earliest attempts to remake Scots came at something of cross purposes, marked with an ambivalence as to whether he wanted revival and preservation – a “project of linguistic recovery” – or something aimed more purely at experimentation and invention, what Hart calls the “avant-garde hypostatization of linguistic scholarship.”Footnote ¹⁸⁴ As the writing of Cornish Song progressed, MacDiarmid pushed the impulse towards revival and preservation aside emphatically, and instead embraced a transnational cosmopolitanism modeled on Arne Garborg (1851–1924) and Joyce whose “European range in technique and ideas” had “striking affinities” with his own practice.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ “Theoretically – and to some extent practically,” he told The Free Man,

Likening himself to Joyce, MacDiarmid insisted (often in pseudonymous reviews praising his own work) that “in cerebral and psychological interpretation” he was doing for Scotland something “like what Mr Joyce has done for Ireland,” for “Mr M‘Diarmid thus resembles Mr Joyce in his attitude to the religion of his countrymen, to sexual problems, to political and cultural nationalism, to humbug, hypocrisy, and sentimentalism, [and] in his preoccupation with ‘interior revelation.’”Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Whether or not MacDiarmid’s work reflected an authentically Joycean character, he did go far, by sheer number, with his synthetic idiom, producing between the years of 1937 and 1939 more than 20,000 lines of verse, an amount that showed, he claimed, how he had left “Joyce at the starting-post so far as the use of multi-linguistics is concerned.”Footnote ¹⁸⁸

Yet, as critics of Cornish Heroic Song have suggested, MacDiarmid’s attempts at ‘world’ poetry still remained clearly marked with “the ineradicability of English.”Footnote ¹⁸⁹ His idiom was not so much a global language inflected with a wide range of syntactic patterns and complex code-switching but instead an “English coloured with exotic quotations.”Footnote ¹⁹⁰ When faced with the poem’s synthesis, English readers can with relative ease, as Hart observes,

MacDiarmid’s idiom – suffused in foreign intrusions – did ensure that his verse would appear “lexically deterritorialized” for English readers, especially when compared with other conventional or seemingly ‘accessible’ forms of poetry, yet it is important to note that this ‘deterritorialization’ was not absolute.Footnote ¹⁹² His idiom does not require to any substantive degree the parallel activation of multiple languages, semantically or phonologically, nor does it effectively generate meaning across multiple tongues – not as Joyce had tried perhaps to do more effectively through the “strange slithery slipping, dreamy nightmarish prose” of Anna Livia Plurabelle.Footnote ¹⁹³ Its idioglossic fusion radiated what Æ called “wild meanings arising out of arcane affinities with other words, the whole gurgling and slipping like water.”Footnote ¹⁹⁴ Nevertheless, though many have thought the poem’s apparent “erudition … sometimes bogus,” MacDiarmid still believed his “huge” Cornish Heroic Song had “worked out all the interconnexions,” the “mutual inter-activity” needed, to exorcise the “linguistic imperialism” of English ascendancy.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ That tendency with its “magnificent insularity / Which is the pride of the Anglo-Saxon mind,” he wrote, had been seen squarely in calls that Basic English be adopted “as the supra-national language,” a reality which

Criticism of Basic English notwithstanding, the synthetic poetry MacDiarmid was producing with a “vast international vocabulary” reflected parallel schemes for summing “up all the rest.”Footnote ¹⁹⁷ The self-taught insularity and crippling isolation MacDiarmid experienced on the Shetlands made him more vulnerable, it seems, to delusions of apocalyptic clairvoyance: the “multitudinous waves of speech” his verse possessed had “language elements,” he fantasized, which “effectively combined” could “utterly change the nature of man.”Footnote ¹⁹⁸

Addressing not just the Scottish but Anglophobic nationalists drawn from across “Cornwall, Scotland, Ireland, Wales,” he exhorted “young Celts arise with quick tongues intact” to do what their “elders” lying “tongueless under the ocean of history” had reputedly not done: claim alternative ‘classical’ values and rive away “the heavy oily blood-rich tongue” of the “white whale,” England’s “hideous khaki Empire.”Footnote ²⁰⁰ By effectively depleting any clear connection to Greek and Roman literature from the ‘classical’ and ‘classicism’, MacDiarmid dislodged classics from the once seminal role it played in enfranchising the English ruling class; the culturally enforced guardianship of the Celtic and other minority literatures was to be deposed. As the “identity-forming power” of classics shifted elsewhere, its authority was employed to serve ‘new’ postcolonial constituencies, where “Anglocentric” hegemony was not reinforced or seen as a given condition of British imperial inheritance.Footnote ²⁰¹ “Red blasts of the fire come quivering – yes, we dare,” MacDiarmid declared,

That his global synthesis possessed an eschatological vision, heralding new international unity, that this vision moreover did not subject particular forms of national expression to a forced assimilation imposed by “supra-national language,” was never in doubt for MacDiarmid.Footnote ²⁰³ Yet the difficulty of his synthetic English – to say little of the fact that his work was forged in radical isolation – made finding a venue for publication troublesome, even among those considered more sympathetic to the avant-garde. Writing to Eliot in February 1938, MacDiarmid proposed a large, 4,000 to 5,000 line section of Cornish Heroic Song for publication in The Criterion, a portion he had re-entitled Mature Art. The work was

Eliot responded politely, noting that, while his poem appeared to be an “extremely interesting, individual, and indeed very remarkable piece of work,” The Criterion could not afford to print it in its entirety: “There can be no doubt that it is something that ought to be published, but the question is how, and by whom … I cannot get my colleagues to consider undertaking a work in verse of this size. I cannot afford to lose much money for them on poetry.”Footnote ²⁰⁵ Instead, for The Criterion’s final issue of January 1939, Eliot chose to publish only a small, nine-page excerpt – the “First Appendix (Cornwall)” – of MacDiarmid’s “extremely long unpublished poem.”Footnote ²⁰⁶ Later, larger portions of Mature Art would appear in 1955 when MacDiarmid pledged himself to the “forward-straining vision” of Joyce, refashioning parts of his long poetic sequence as In Memoriam James Joyce, From A Vision of World Language.Footnote ²⁰⁷ The initial difficulty, however, of finding a publisher – or indeed of appealing to a wide audience – did not faze MacDiarmid. Years earlier he had scoffed at the suggestion that A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle ought to be divided into sections for the common reader. Such divisions would simply be “‘hand-rails’” to “raise false hopes in the ingenuous minds of readers whose rational intelligences are all too insusceptible of realising the enormities of which ‘highbrows’ of my type are capable – even in Scotland.”Footnote ²⁰⁸ In similar fashion he once demanded that the nationalist periodical The Voice of Scotland (of which he was then editor) maintain its “highly specialised appeal to the ablest minds,” impacting opinion solely among the social, political and artistic elite, not among commoners.Footnote ²⁰⁹ A “continuity of culture” could be maintained not by popular acclamation but “by a very small number of people indeed – and these not necessarily the best equipped with worldly advantages.”Footnote ²¹⁰ Far from shirking the ambition of Cornish Heroic Song, MacDiarmid plunged himself further into work. Beginning a memoir, Lucky Poet (1943), to recount his “desperate” struggles, he cast himself as a ‘learned’ poet then embarking “on a course … in the teeth of all the opposition of those who hate versatility,” and versatility, MacDiarmid boasted, was at the heart of Cornish Heroic Song: its virtuosic synthesis of languages deployed nothing less than what Coleridge called the mind’s “prime & loftiest Faculty,” the “esemplastic power” of human imagination.Footnote ²¹¹ “Is this not what we require?” he declared,

While Coleridge had coined “esemplastic” from the Greek, εἰς ἕν πλάττειν – an anglicization of Friedrich Schelling’s notion, Ineinsbildung (the so-called interweaving of opposites) – MacDiarmid saw in the neologism further evidence that his synthetic techniques – those he had worked out with the “sudden jostling of contraries” of the “Caledonian antisyzygy” – had broader reach across history.Footnote ²¹³ According to Coleridge it was Shakespeare, above all, who possessed not merely “poetic genius” but the “power of reducing multitude into unity of effect … modifying a series of thoughts by some one predominant thought or feeling.”Footnote ²¹⁴ That fact made Shakespeare “our myriad-minded” poet – an ἀνὴρ μυριόνους – whose mastery of “combination” and “intertexture” authenticated the aphorism (sometimes attributed to the Roman grammarian Pseudo-Acro): “Poeta nascitur non fit.”Footnote ²¹⁵

Yet the ‘myriad-mindedness’ that Christopher Grieve was eager to arrogate to his own pseudonymous mask, Hugh MacDiarmid, was not as inborn as the grammarian imagined but one which MacDiarmid had acquired on the Shetlands, where by January 1942 he had spent nearly nine years “rowing about on lonely waters; lying brooding in uninhabited islands; seeing no newspapers and in other ways cutting myself completely away from civilised life.”Footnote ²¹⁶ As a student at Langholm Academy, Grieve had been considered “utterly unamenable to discipline of any kind,” so much so that his headmaster spoke of a “terrible vein of recklessness” that ran through him.Footnote ²¹⁷ It was the development of Grieve’s irreverence, though, that drove him to invent Hugh MacDiarmid and his ‘myriad-minded’ global classicism. That classicism prized, he thought, not neoclassical forgeries of the Greek and Roman but a broad openness to the possibility that all nations could realize their genius “to classic effect as the Greeks themselves did.”Footnote ²¹⁸ However, even as MacDiarmid desired “something far more radical than a return to any ‘classical’ formalism,” he himself possessed little fluency with those modern and ancient languages on which he purported to draw to classic effect.Footnote ²¹⁹ Yet still he bullishly called on these, convinced that his being “an omnivorous reader” would help him bring together “vital contemporary poetry no matter in what European country or language it was being produced.”Footnote ²²⁰ Thus while a sense of being cut off from an operative “continuity of culture” always haunted MacDiarmid, that “remoteness” proved to be a “stimulating rather than obstructive” force for his work.Footnote ²²¹ Opposing “intellectual apathy” he claimed to work with

Although MacDiarmid’s forms of linguistic appropriation were compromised by his aggression, they still nonetheless fertilized powerful synthetic experiments in Scots and in English, experiments predicated not on nostalgia for the purity of classics but on a vision of greater global integration. This future MacDiarmid marked with spectacular fantasies of multilingual fusion on which the “whole life” of all traditions and cultures would depend.Footnote ²²³ To enact again what “Greece itself had done,” to understand the “Ur-motives” that had shaped the fundamental form of all literatures, one had to turn the ‘classical’ impulse away from a fatal drift towards imitation.Footnote ²²⁴ The ‘classical’ was, for him, a predominantly local phenomenon, something that could be weaponized in forms of invention and resistance against English ascendancy. By deploying something akin to what the historian C. L. R. James (1901–89) defined as the “postcolonial prerogative,” MacDiarmid believed the “native potentialities” of so-called minor languages and peripheral literatures could reconfigure themselves and upset the dominant linguistic, economic and social conditions of the present.Footnote ²²⁵ Mere revival, mere renaissance, could aspire to something beyond, a reality bent closer to the synthetic manifestation of a “world-soul,” a “cosmical unity still more perfect.”Footnote ²²⁶