Scotland, like so many other nations, has produced poetry that is
patriotic, that paints landscapes, people and situations, that
speaks to personal matters, and those equally everyday matters
pertaining to the mind and to the spirit. The Christian heritage of
Scotland has long been played out in verse, through Celtic
devotional works, Catholic works, Protestant works, and not
forgetting satires on the Puritanism in Scotland's post-Reformation
identity. Language and culture have been equally multifarious in
the nation so that three major languages: Scots, English and Gaelic
(examples of which are translated in this anthology) compete and
co-exist in poetry. The fifteenth century poet, William Dunbar,
joked that there was no music in hell except for the bagpipes, and
there speaks something of the historic lowland attitude to the
Gaidhealtachd (Gaelic speaking Scotland, principally the
highlands). Hostility and eventual harmony is a marker of the
Scottish highlands/lowlands divide as much as for that between
Scotland and England. Historic tension is not to be dismissed but,
certainly, the poetic palette of Scotland is one of multilingual
richness, and shows an enduringly high quality whatever the
cultural vicissitudes that play a part. The medieval Makars, most
prominently Robert Henryson, William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas, are
often taken to represent a golden age when poetry in Scots ran the
full range of mood, mode and subject matter. If this has, perhaps,
never been bettered, the sixteenth century lyrics and sonnets of
Alexander Montgomerie, Alexander Scott and other poets around the
court of James VI, and the eighteenth century vernacular 'revival'
of Allan Ramsay, Alexander Ross, Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns
represent at points equally brilliant periods; and the twentieth
century 'modern renaissance' of Hugh MacDiarmid, Violet Jacob and
William Souter proved that Scots remained a viable poetic currency,
as a living poet such as Tom Leonard continues to demonstrate.
Poetry in Gaelic too has its tradition of peaks where the flame
seems to burn more visibly at certain times than others. Alexander
Macdonald (Alasdair Mac Mhaghstir Alasdair), Rob Donn (Rob Donn
MacAoidh) and Duncan MacIntyre (Donnchadh Ban Mac an t-Saoir) make
the eighteenth century a high point in achievement, while Sorley
Maclean, George Campbell Hay and Iain Crichton Smith do similarly
for the twentieth century: the latter three, arguably, making
Gaelic verse the most able variety in Scotland during the last
sixty years. Historically as many successes are scored in Scottish
poetry in English. James Thomson, author of The Seasons, joins
James Macpherson translator/creator of the poetry of 'Ossian' in
promulgating works that are seminally iconic and influential right
across the artistic genres, painting and music as much as
literature, in western culture. The romantic, patriotic poetic
image of Scotland is sounded in English as much as in any other
language, as the writing of Walter Scott or Lady Nairne attests.
James (B.V.) Thomson, John Davidson, Edwin Muir, Norman MacCaig,
W.S. Graham, Edwin Morgan, Liz Lochhead, Kathleen Jamie and Don
Paterson are all deeply Scottish poets speaking through the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the worldwide audience that
exists for creative utterance that both emanates from but is never
limited by the particularity of place. Scotland's story is one that
is never certain, but, enduringly and importantly its poetry is.
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