"The Omnific Word": Hugh MacDiarmid’s Religious Poetry

Lyall, Scott

Abstract

This talk examines a range of Hugh MacDiarmid’s religious poetry. ‘Religious’ is defined here in the very broadest sense as poems that deal with questions of meaning from a wide spiritual or metaphysical perspective, rather than solely from the narrower perspective of a belief in a particular religious system, such as Christianity; poems that refer to God, even where that reference implies God’s non-existence; and poems and prose pieces addressing Christianity, both in its Protestant and Catholic forms, sometimes critically and sometimes favourably. The talk is set in the framework of criticism that relates modernism to religion. It looks at two key related ideas: firstly, the idea of palingenesis – meaning, rebirth or recreation; and secondly and more briefly, the idea of ‘return’ examined most usefully in my contexts by Jeffrey M. Perl. It relates MacDiarmid’s religious poetry to his aims for literary and cultural revival in Scotland and beyond and looks at this in the context of the history of ideas rather than detailed close reading. The talk will link palingenesis to the ideas of Thomas Carlyle and end with a discussion of ‘On a Raised Beach’. Palingenesis and return – to be reborn, and not in the evangelical sense – are themes central to MacDiarmid’s poetry and the theory and practice of cultural revival. The argument is that while a Scottish revivalist such as MacDiarmid did not premise his proposed national renaissance on the resacralisation of the land in the manner of Irish revivalists and the generation of poet-soldiers of the Easter Rising (both of which are referred to at some length in the talk), religion and revival are linked in MacDiarmid’s positions in ways that, while less obvious than those in Ireland, remain important, and one of the main examples of this is in the recurrent significance of questions of life and death vis-à-vis questions of spiritual meaning in his poetry.

• Presentation Conference Type: Keynote
• Conference Name: Hugh MacDiarmid, 1923−2023: Visions and Revisions
• Start Date: Jun 15, 2023
• End Date: Jun 16, 2023
• Deposit Date: Jun 4, 2023