Hugh MacDiarmid's Poetry and Politics of Place: Imagining a Scottish Republic (review)

Despite significant shifts in recent criticism from a unitary notion of modernism or a distinction between "high modernism" and other twentieth-century voices, Scottish modernism remains, outside Scotland, largely unexamined or still submerged under the term "British." In practice this has meant predominantly English or centered in England. Yet the Scottish Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s reveals distinctive claims about fundamental issues in modernism: nationalism, postcolonialism, identity, linguistic difference, city and country, center and margin. As Margery Palmer McCulloch's Modernism and Nationalism (2004) demonstrates, modernism in Scotland produced a complex set of philosophical debates about social, economic, and political life inseparable from literary revival. This revival, she argues, "is also unusual in the context of the modernist period generally, in this respect having more in common with Shelley's belief in the poet or artist as 'unacknowledged legislator' than with modernist detachment."¹

It is thus especially welcome to see Scott Lyall's focus on Hugh MacDiarmid's poetry and politics, not least because MacDiarmid, the major figure of the Scottish Renaissance, is undoubtedly the least studied of major modernists: only a few books exist on his work and its continuing impact on Scottish, and British, life and letters. Yet within Scotland, Celtic regions of the United Kingdom, and Ireland—both John Montague and Seamus Heaney acknowledge his influence—he represented a vision of literature and culture that was emphatically not English, not defined by London, and not part of T. S. Eliot's "Tradition." Lyall sets out to demonstrate that MacDiarmid's poetry and political philosophy take their origin from small places and, moreover, affirm the universality and significance of the local. In contrast to modernists who define modern space as the urban metropolis, MacDiarmid found in villages, small towns, and the loneliness of Shetland his vision of a modernism that affirms difference, pluralism, and resistance to all imperialisms. And, in contrast to much MacDiarmid criticism that emphasizes the poet's contradictions, Lyall argues that his call for nationalism and socialism together is intellectually coherent. "I want," he states, "to argue for the essential relatedness of MacDiarmid's political ideas. His nationalism and socialism should not be thought of as separate, clashing political entities; rather, in MacDiarmid's political imagination, they find symbiotic union in a Scottish Republicanism that develops from his concerted engagement with Scotland" (16). Lyall's is the most fully developed, as well as the most convincing, argument in support of MacDiarmid's own persistent claim that internationalism was not in conflict with nationalism but, in fact, required it; for MacDiarmid this meant a life-long commitment to expanding human consciousness through social change that retained individual eccentricity and authenticity. He believed, Lyall claims, that "An independent Scotland would not become a small reactionary state, a bulwark of capitalism and bourgeois culture, but a bastion of socialism and scientific progress" (126).

Lyall structures his book to demonstrate this thesis about the intersection of place and Scottish Republicanism. He begins with an overview of MacDiarmid's "Scottish Republic," a physical and intellectual space where distinctive culture can develop and contribute to other nations. Lyall attributes this idea to his four years in the First World War. He then traces MacDiarmid's evolving theory from its roots in the village of Langholm to his whirl of political and journalistic activity in Montrose in the 1920s to his isolated years on the Shetland island of Whalsay. Chapters on each of these places combine biography with analysis of the prose and poetry. Each chapter defines a critical point in MacDiarmid's development, from youthful autodidact and self-elected poet-intellectual discovering an "independent community ethos," to activist and propagandist for a Scottish Renaissance, to "spiritual Celtic communist" maintaining a philosophic claim for "the particularity...