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Poets' Pub » Hugh MacDiarmid
Sangshaw
A description of the 1925 edition
Hardback, 190mm x 122mm, paper wraps
The front cover gives title and author name, and also a blurb stating
that the poems included have been translated (into French and Danish),
and set to music, but interestingly there is nothing regarding the
development of Scots, or Scotland, or Modernism.
The author's name is given as Hugh M'Diarmid. W.R. Aitken comments:
"it is perhaps worth mentioning that C.M. Grieve's pseudonymous
surname was spelt successively in different ways. He first used
the pseudonym in 1922, and on the title pages of his early books
published by Blackwood the spelling used is M'Diarmid with a turned
comma, not an apostrophe. Later we find McDairmid, Macdiarmid, and
finally MacDiarmid... the poet used [the spelling MacDiarmid] consistently
from about 1932." (See Gish, Nancy (ed.), Hugh MacDiarmid: Man
and Poet (Edinburgh & Maine, 1992), p.297.)
The opening pages are numbered i to xii; the poems follow on pages
numbered 1 to 58; 'Opinions on Mr M'Diarmid's Poetry' then follow
on pages numbered 1 to 4; and there are four mostly blank pages
at the end.
The title page (p.iii) includes an epigraph in Latin:
HABENT SUA FATA LIBELLI
given as 'books have their destinies', from Maurus, De Litteris,
Syllabis et Metris, in Chambers English Dictionary (1988).
The volume as a whole contains the dedication TO MY MOTHER (p.v):
Elizabeth Grieve (n•e Graham, 1856-1934).
A NOTE (pp.vii-viii) gives acknowledgements for poems previously
published and/or translated. The opening poem, 'The Bonnie Broukit
Bairn', appeared in the anthology The Northern Muse: An Anthology
of Scots Vernacular Poetry, 'arranged' [ie edited] by John Buchan,
and published in 1924. This opens with Dunbar and features mostly
older poems, interspersed with some contemporary work. 'The Bonnie
Broukit Bairn' (credited to 'C.M. Grieve'), is the only poem by
MacDiarmid in the anthology, and opens Book XV, 'Lacrimae Rerum'
(the tears of things).
A PREFACE by John Buchan (pp.ix-x) claims that MacDiarmid's task
is "at once reactionary and revolutionary... he would treat Scots
as a living language and apply it to matters which have been foreign
to it since the sixteenth century [i.e. since the Reformation, and
the introduction of an English-language bible]. Since there is no
canon of the vernacular, he makes his own, as Burns did."
The CONTENTS page lists and numbers the POEMS: in Scots, 1-27; in
English, 28; in French, 29, without giving page numbers.
There follow the poems (pp.1-54) and a Glossary (pp. 55-58). 'Opinions
on Mr M'Diarmid's Poetry' offers seven texts, in English & French,
whose authors include G.R. Malloch and Alexander M'Gill, the dedicatees
of, respectively, the poems 'The Sauchs in the Reuch Heuch Hauch'
and 'The Scarlet Woman'.
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Hugh MacDiarmid
Sangshaw
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