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Scottish and Welsh poetry
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or objective, fashionable or self-conscious, genuine or fleeting; and
such a question can probably never be fully answered.
The decade that began with Consider and the need to alert readers
of poetry to immediate contemporary events ended with a message
that poetry cannot really influence things. Auden’s own departure
from England to America to some extent symbolised this change of
attitude from commitment to withdrawal.
SCOTTISH AND WELSH POETRY
Scottish literature has always been polyglot: the linguistic influences of
the Highlands, the Lowlands, Norway, England, France, and Rome have
all shaped the language, thought and style of Scottish writing. Gaelic,
the Celtic language of the far North, was suppressed for many years,
but in the twentieth century there has been a considerable revival of
Gaelic speaking and writing, led by such poets as Sorley Maclean.
Although it does not contain the kind of mythical tales found in
Welsh literature, in The Mabinogion, Scotland has provided a great
deal of Romantic literature through the eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury
rewriting of its myth and history by Ossian and, most
significantly, Sir Walter Scott.
The major Scottish poet of the twentieth century, Hugh MacDiarmid,
attempted in the 1920s to create a Scottish poetic language based on
Lowlands (Lallans). This has sometimes been called synthetic Scots,
but it is in fact a return to the language used in a long tradition, from
Henryson and Dunbar around 1500 to Burns in the eighteenth century.
MacDiarmid was a strong Scottish nationalist, and his attempts to
throw off English linguistic domination helped to create a nationalistic
cultural identity at a time when political identities and ideals were
being questioned all over the world.
A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926) is MacDiarmid’s best-known
work, and is held by many to be one of the major long poems of the
century. His First Hymn to Lenin (1931) and Second Hymn to Lenin (1932)
are highly significant as examples of the earliest left-wing poems, establishing
what was to become a major trend in the 1930s. His later work, in English
as well as in Scots, kept him in the forefront of cultural debate for a further