Brit-Pop, or, Bringing It All Back Home: On Andrew Greig's Western Swing

In memoriam Edward Dorn, 1929-1999

I understand the "pocket epic" to be one of the solutions to the problem of the long poem in the twentieth century. It is a distinctively British alternative to the various solutions embraced by North American modernists and postmodernists, including the lyric sequence, the serial poem, and the poem coterminous with the poet's life. ¹ The wild-card in that statement is, of course, the term "British." That term's function, here as elsewhere, is to paper over the cracks among the disparate national cultures constituting the United Kingdom. To speak of the "British pocket epic" is to obscure or diminish the special situations of poets in the Welsh, Scottish and Northern-Irish "hinterlands" relative to the English "heartland." By way of countering this submergence of difference, I will be focussing here on the special conditions under which a Scottish "pocket epic" has come to be produced in our time.

My text, still largely unknown in the United States, is Western Swing, a hundred-page, open-form narrative poem in five parts by the Scottish poet, novelist, and mountaineer Andrew Greig, published by Bloodaxe Books in 1994. ² Greig's solution to the problem of writing a long poem, though specific to the Scottish situation, has applications beyond Scotland, as I hope to suggest at the end of my essay.

I. The Problem

In our time, the writing of a Scottish pocket epic is an undertaking fraught with dilemmas and double-binds. Some of these dilemmas are attributable to the vexed situation of Scottish national culture in general, the dimensions of which were brought to light by Tom Nairn in an analysis that still, over twenty years later, has yet to be bettered. ³ But other dilemmas arise from the postwar history of the pocket epic genre itself.

Since the war, the pocket epic has come to be associated with localism, and not just any localism, but English localism in particular; think of the Northumbria of Basil Bunting's Briggflatts (1966), or the West Midlands of Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns (1971); David Jones's The Anathemata (1952) is a conspicuous (partial) exception. So powerfully and decisively has the postwar English pocket epic appropriated localism, that it is as though the local as such, the very principle of localism, had become a monopoly of English poets. This was not by any means inevitable, if we regard the founders of the British pocket epic to have been Eliot, the expatriate American, and MacDiarmid, the Scottish nationalist. But Eliot's legacy, in particular, is a divided one, as reflected in, on the one hand, the modernist cosmopolitanism of The Waste Land, and on the other, the localism of Four Quartets. (After all, three of the four Quartets are identified by name with specifically English places.)

So if place is in some sense a generic feature of pocket epic, and if place in general has come to be narrowly identified, through the accidents of literary history, with specifically English places, then the Scottish poet finds herself or himself excluded from the outset, or at least forced into a difficult position. The difficulty is further aggravated by the fact that specifically Scottish localism is tainted, for the Scottish writer, by its association with the "Kailyard School" parochialism of the last century and the first decades of the present one.

Fortunately, there is also an enduring tradition of Scottish internationalism upon which contemporary poets can draw as an alternative to the localism that seems, for various reasons, to have been foreclosed to them. ⁴ One of the cherished myths of Scottish identity is the compatibility of Scottish cultural nationalism with an international outlook. By contrast with English culture's putative insularity, Scottish culture prides itself on its orientation toward Continental Europe and the world at large. Calling Scottish internationalism a...