To Circumjack Cencrastus; or, The Curly Snake

1930

Brasch PR6013 R735 C45

Edinburgh: William Blackwood

Hugh MacDiarmid’s Muse is a Gaelic muse. Born Christopher Murray Grieve, he began using the pseudonym ‘Hugh MacDiarmid’ with poetry he wrote in Scots, a language which had flourished in Scotland before the 1701 Union with England. During the 1920s Scottish Renaissance, MacDiarmid encouraged Scottish writers to write in an eclectic Scots, ‘synthetic Scots’ or ‘Lallans,’ thus recovering a distinctive national consciousness, voice, and culture. Appropriately, he gives his heart to a Gaelic Muse, claiming kinship to Yeats and the Gaelic poet Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair and urging a Gaelic revival.