The wider context

The 1920s, between the Great War and the Depression, was a period in which the old pre-war hierarchies had been swept away, and the rise of Fascism on the back of mass unemployment was just beginning. There was a sense both of decline and regeneration, of exhaustion and a release of new energies. The change was most dramatically realised in Russia, where feudalism had given way to Soviet Communism without going through an intervening stage of bourgeois democracy (the process Marx had considered necessary to the creation of communist society). Scientific discoveries were changing the perception of the world, from technological advances (the development of the motor-car and the aeroplane) to conceptual leaps (Einstein's theory of relativity). Sangschaw reflects this sense of rebirth, of renewal, of a great release of energy.

With their source in the ballads of the Scottish border country, the poems in Sangschaw are opposed to the urban landscapes and fragmented form and narratives of many other contemporary modernists, especially Eliot and Joyce - although both drew in different ways on traditional material (whether derived from anthropology or classical literature). More direct parallels can be drawn between MacDiarmid's activities and the work of poets like Pound and Lorca, who were drawing on such mediaeval sources as the songs of the ProvenÍal troubadours, and Spanish folk-song. Through these they aimed to create new poetic idioms in their respective languages, capable of dealing with the complexity of the modern world, and using the past as a foundation or ground of experience with which to attempt to overcome the sense of alienation created by the development of an advanced industrial society.

In Great Britain, the Labour Party became for the first time the party of government when Ramsey MacDonald led a minority government in 1923-24. The labour unrest which had followed the war culminated in the unsuccessful General Strike of 1926, which was solidly supported in Scotland. John MacLean, who had unsuccessfully advocated a separate Communist Party for Scotland, died in 1923, and thereafter for over sixty years socialism was defined as an all-British movement, with calls for Scottish self-rule generally viewed with suspicion on the left as nationalistic and reactionary.

Scottish writing was beginning to emerge from the so-called 'kailyard' a school of writing which sentimentally promoted small-town and rural values. The country's best-known writers, J.M. Barrie and John Buchan, became part of the British 'establishment', with Buchan serving as a Conservative MP from 1927-35, although in their work there are tensions between their British and Scottish identities, expressed partly through a selective use of the Scots language.

© Ken Cockburn 2002

Hugh MacDiarmid
Sangshaw