The wider context

To generalise greatly, the 1950s, in Europe at least, were the most settled and prosperous decade since the century began. After two world wars, a disastrous economic depression, violent revolutions and ideological struggles, Europe had settled into an uneasy peace known as the Cold War, with western European capitalism running neck-and-neck with eastern European communism in the race to rebuild the continent economically and culturally following World War Two. Compared to the interwar years, it was a time of social conformity, a kind of 'back-to-basics' after the vast upheavals of the previous forty years. But all this was contained within a world which, for the first time in human existence, had the capacity to destroy itself overnight, by way of the atom bomb, developed by the USA in the mid-1940s and used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in May 1945; the technology passed by communist sympathisers to the other great world power to emerge after 1945, the Soviet Union. It was an uneasy balance, a peace maintained by the MAD doctrine, Mutually Assured Destruction.

The British Empire, fatally weakened by the war, was unravelling. The reforms introduced by the Labour government swept to power in 1945 - the National Health Service, unemployment benefit, and so on - led to better living conditions for working people, but by 1951 the Conservatives, under wartime leader Churchill, were back in power. The coronation of the young Queen Elizabeth may have been politically meaningless, but was an occasion celebrated with patriotic fervour and enthusiasm throughout Britain.

MacCaig, like Goodsir Smith, writes very much as an individual, but without referring to contemporary events. The poems are given a 'timeless' quality by referring to landscapes, established biblical events, existential situations. There is a sense here of an individual trying to understand and control only his own individual situation; broader social matters are not his concern.

© Ken Cockburn 2002

Norman MacCaig
The Sinai Sort