Hugh MacDiarmid’s Impossible Community

Lyall, Scott

Abstract

This chapter suggests two main related points. The overarching contention is that Hugh MacDiarmid was a poetic, political, polemical, and metaphysical impossibilist (rather than merely the extremist of caricature). More particularly, in an attempt to escape the impossible community of the Kailyard – provincial, retrogressive, Christian, Scotland-as-Brigadoon – MacDiarmid fashioned an equally impossible if conflicting community, profoundly singular yet ultimately spiritual, that nonetheless contained residual Kailyard archetypes. The argument is traced through examination of MacDiarmid’s attitude to the Kailyard; work relating to the small communities in which he lived and wrote, and to cities; and the question of his anti-Englishness.

Citation

Lyall, S. (2016). Hugh MacDiarmid’s Impossible Community. In S. Lyall (Ed.), Community in Modern Scottish Literature (82-102). Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers

• Publication Date: 2016-05
• Deposit Date: May 20, 2016
• Publisher: Brill Academic Publishers
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 82-102
• Book Title: Community in Modern Scottish Literature
• ISBN: 9789004317444
• Keywords: Hugh McDiarmid; community; Scottish literature; Scottish politics; Kailyard; anti-Englishness
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/id/eprint/10246