Sorley MacLean and Sydney Goodsir Smith – poets we need today

His distinctiveness was to bring to the forefront of attention a poetry in Gaelic that was everywhere, evidently, “modern” in its psychological intensity, its unflinching address to matters of modern warfare and brutal conflict, and its understanding and sympathy with the common cause of anti-fascism. This reached from the 1930s and his concern with people caught up in the Spanish Civil War, and drove him towards his own physical commitment to enlisting and fighting Nazism. But it reached further back into his own history as a Gael, opposed to the authority of the landowners who exploited and sent into exile the people of the crofting communities from which his family had come.

Yet his poetry was also distinct because of its psychological individuality and self-torturing anguish with regard to his love and loyalties to women, his own family, his language and his cultural history. This was a poetry to be read, silently, and thought about, deeply, as opposed to most traditional Gaelic verse, created to be held in memory and performed as song. MacLean had read, and been influenced deeply in terms of sensibility rather than style, by WB Yeats and TS Eliot, and had seen what the early lyrical poems of Hugh MacDiarmid could achieve in their mix of traditional Scots language, ballad form and radically modern perspectives, in politics and sexual understanding. Part of MacLean’s impact is due to the depth from which his poems drew upon these experiences.

The 1943 Dain do Eimhir sequence was published in an English-language version by Iain Crichton Smith as Poems to Eimhir in 1971. As a rule, though, MacLean translated his own poetry, first written in Gaelic, into unforgettable English. It was collected in Spring Tide and Neap Tide: Selected Poems (1977); Collected Poems: From Wood to Ridge (1989), and in scholarly, annotated editions of The Cuillin (2011) and White Leaping Flame: Collected Poems (2011). His critical essays in Gaelic and English were published as Ris a’ Bhruthaich (1985). What is remarkable about his publishing career is how few books he published in his lifetime. Yet his reputation, and respect for his work, from the 1940s on, was immense.

A major poet of love and war, the range of MacLean’s poems include the politically passionate, lyrically personal epic sequence “The Cuillin” (1939) in which the mountain range on the island of Skye stands as a living symbol of heroic opposition to those forces that would foreclose life’s potential. The great anti-fascist poems, including the war poems from North Africa in the 1940s, are contemporary with the most self-lacerating of the love poems, and include “Reason and Love”, “The Choice”, “Dogs and Wolves”, “The Bolshevik”, “Going Westward”, “Heroes”, “Death Valley” and “An Autumn Day”. In “Dogs and Wolves”, the eternal savage hunt “without halt, without respite” races over hills and mountains, both an eternal nightmare and an absolute dedication.

Perhaps the central poem of his career is “Hallaig”, a haunting elegy for a cleared township on his native island of Raasay, where the ruined homes of his ancestors can still be seen in a beautiful location redolent with its own tragedy. MacLean’s poem is likened to a bullet that will kill the deer of time and preserve the memory of his people and his place forever: “The dead have been seen alive.” His later elegy for his brother Calum and his passionate denunciation of the authorities and priorities behind the submarines in Hebridean waters with their nuclear-powered weaponry in “Screapadal” are also required reading. Later poems reflect on the relations of language, power and violence in the legacies that connect Scotland and Ireland, especially in “The National Museum of Ireland” and “At Yeats’s Grave”.

Friend to MacLean, Garioch, MacDiarmid, indeed almost all the poets of this generation, and a catalyst for enjoyment in any good company, Sydney Goodsir Smith (1915-75) was a flamboyant figure and in his writing and it seems in his person, was a lavish verbal profligate. Born in New Zealand, Smith adopted Edinburgh and the Scots language to produce vivid evocations of the old city and its raucous, sensitive, loving and drinking inhabitants in his poems and plays. If Robert Garioch’s urban Edinburgh Scots is authentically vernacular, Goodsir Smith’s is rhetorically charged and gestural, yet it also carries a humility and compassionate grace that is instantly recognisable, like that of Pablo Neruda:

There is a tide in luve’s affair

Nae poem ere was made

The saul hings like a gull in air

For aa the words are said.

Nou in this saagin-tide we swey

While the warld wags and empires faa

But we that burned high Ilium

What can we rack, that ken it aa?

While he is a fine lyric love poet he also developed a fluent, conversational Scots-language idiom in long-lined free verse, portraying characters and situations, in poems such as “The Grace of God and the Meth-Drinker” and his masterpiece, the fabulous book-length sequence of love poems, Under the Eildon Tree (1948). This gathers the stories of the great lovers of world literature into a Rabelaisian company where he finds himself in an affinity of comic and tragic realisation.

Deirdre and Naoise and Helen and Paris are here, but alongside them equal in importance and as pungently present is the “bonny cou” (a prostitute) from the Black Bull o’ Norroway, an Edinburgh pub, and the dark bars and dingy alleyways and wynds of the historical old town are as populous with lusty lovers as the realms of fiction and myth. Grandiose gestures and declarations of love rub shoulders with massively reductive and deflating gutter-low perspectives. Elation is there, but so is the pox. His version of the Orpheus story might be read alongside that of Robert Henryson.

Goodsir Smith also wrote the riotous “novel” of extended wordplay, caricature and anti-narrative bagatelle, Carotid Cornucopius (1947), in which many of the major characters of the Scottish literary and artistic scene are described, almost as if in code, obliquely, drinking heavily and roaming through adventures of various Rabelaisian sorts in the common bye-ways and alleys of old Edinburgh. You have to squint to see them. The central character is SGS, the great auk or auk-tor seen in various stages of self-indulgence with his friends, poets Chris Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid), Sorley MacLean, and the artist Denis Peploe.

Goodsir Smith was art critic for The Scotsman and had a wide range of friends in all sorts of social strata. His A Short Introduction to Scottish Literature (1951) was an important publication in its timely attempt to provide a comprehensive overview in accessible language and a small number of pages. It remains contagiously enthusiastic. His chronicle history-play The Wallace (1960) was an enormous success at the Edinburgh International Festival and his Collected Poems (1976) appeared posthumously and included translations (including a brilliant version of Alexander Blok’s “The Twelve”). A dedicated drinker, it is said that he once rolled up to a bar and asked for a beer and whisky chaser, only to discover that he was leaning on the counter of a branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland. Personally vivacious, he was by all accounts an enhancer of character, one of those people who could walk into a room and almost helplessly turn everything on, and Whitman-like, spread, and liberally squander his own beneficence, and celebrate that of all around him.

Sorley MacLean and Sydney Goodsir Smith: would their like were alive today! The world hath need.