THE NEW PENGUIN BOOK OF SCOTTISH VERSE. Robert Crawford and Mick Imlah,
editors. 560pp. Allen Lane The Penguin Press. Pounds 20. TLS Pounds 18 - 0
713
99238 7
From the Makars to Morgan and Muir: varieties of Scottish poetry.
Has the Scottish poetic tradition common characteristics that could
recognizably be reflected in an anthology? Robert Crawford and Mick Imlah,
in the introduction to their New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse, suggest
that weather is a characteristic subject; and you can see what they mean: "clouds
showering wet winter" (St Colomba); "Schouris of haill gart fra
the north discend" (Henryson); "Reveris ran reid on spait with
watteir broune" (Douglas); "the enormous waste of vapour, tossed /
In billows, lengthening out the horizon round" (Beattie). But, as the
last two examples show, landscape might be as good a label for the Scottish
subject. Scotland's landscape – majuscule Lake District, miniature massif,
epitome of stern nature – has inspired many Scottish poets.
A relish for pungent utterance is surely another characteristic. And, one
might add, a specially demotic quality, not anti-intellectual like English
demotic; Scots are expected to be educated enough to master the Knowledge of
the entire cosmos and to put you right, or just to let you know. So the
Harrisonian shoulder-chip is largely absent from Scottish poetry, or, at
least, has been extrajected on to the English ("yoo scruff").
Then, there is a characteristic, flamboyant self-assertion ("Here I
ligg, Sydney Slugabed Godless Smith"), a quality not always wholly
attractive to suddron folk. Then, in a less aggressive tone, there is
direct, honest sincerity, often expressed with lyric simplicity. The sort of
oblique irony common in English poetry from Milton and Pope to Geoffrey Hill
seems not to be within the Scottish gamut, even in satire.
Of course, there may be no characteristics completely separating Scottish from
English poetry. Before T. S. Eliot became a great poet, when he was a
provincial arriviste pushing into the English literary Establishment, he
wrote an ambivalent review of George Gregory Smith's Scottish Literature
(1919), called "Was there a Scottish Literature?" Eliot denied
that "any tenable distinction" any longer existed between English
and Scottish literature. A separate, decentralized Scottish literature was
not part of Pound's and Eliot's game plan; taking control of one literary
scene was enough to go on with. Eliot needed a metropolitan literature, with
international parameters that might allow him in. Besides, he knew little
about Scottish literature.
In Devolving English Literature (1992; a new edition has just been published
by Edinburgh University Press), Crawford treats Eliot's review with
forbearance, finding provincial common ground between Eliot and Gregory
Smith. But the review was a superficial, if not disingenuous performance.
After all, Eliot's title had no more validity than "Was there an
English literature?" English literature might be the "mind"
of south-east England but hardly of Wales or the North. The tradition Eliot
wished to modify was that of the Establishment. His British-English
literature was not, indeed, an individual invention. He shared the
conception with English educators and editors of Oxford Books of English
Verse - a conception that would prevail until at last Christopher Ricks in
1999 bravely included Edward Taylor and Anne Bradstreet, Scottish and
dialectal English poets. The metropolitan Eliot readily subscribed to the
official disregard of Scots, Welsh, French, English Latin and northern
English, as well as to a marginalizing of dialect poetry such as William
Barnes's. Anthologists of English poetry have seemingly had no qualms about
this. They have contentedly relegated Welsh to separate Books of Welsh
Verse. Similarly, with neo-Latin, although fine Latin verse has had to be
excluded, by English poets from Gower, through Milton, George Herbert,
Crashaw and Marvell, to Gerard Manley Hopkins. For anthologists of Scottish
poetry, such turning of a blind eye has come less easily.
Not that the multilingual character of Scottish culture has in itself made
things difficult. True, in the early centuries, Scottish poetry might be
composed in Latin, Pictish, Welsh, Irish, Gaelic, Old Norse, or Scots
(called "Inglis" or "English"). But English literature
is similarly heterogeneous. What makes the difference in Scotland is that,
although a sense of nationhood developed as early as anywhere in Europe, no
single standard language predominated until a relatively late date. In
fourteenth-century England, the language of Chaucer and the court already
dominated, even if the "dialect" of the Gawain poet (now
unreadable without the assistance of scholarship) continued to make a
brilliant challenge. But Celts have never much liked being ruled by
foreigners with authoritative accents; Scottish Gaelic in the seventeenth
century was still a rallying point for the dissident following of the Lord
of the Isles. For centuries, Gaelic speaking was actively discouraged by the
authorities of Scotland, and, after 1707, of Britain. Yet, despite (or
because of) this, a distinct revival of Gaelic supervened in the eighteenth
century.
The most significant older Scottish poetry dates from the Renaissance, and is
mostly in standard Scots, the language of court literature. Already,
however, the language of intellectuals and men of letters was becoming
anglicized. Scots ambitious to communicate widely - merchants and writers
such as John Knox, Robert Ayton and James VI himself - increasingly often
chose to "knap suddron" (chatter in southern English). After 1603,
when James found himself with more English than Scottish subjects, and moved
his court to England, the Scots language lost something in status. Yet
English people give offence, sometimes unintentionally, when they speak of
Scots as a dialect. For it is a language, with its own grammar, just like
the English realization of English. Scots has its own regional dialects,
some of them mutually incomprehensible, such as Buchan and Ayrshire. These
are so different, indeed, as to pose serious obstacles to any recovery of
standard Scots. Once this was true of English dialects (as Caxton observed);
but, in the south, urbanization and the class structuring of speech seem to
have gone further to put dialects in their place.
Eliot may have genuinely believed that Scottish literature no longer existed. He
was prepared to recognize Irish and, of course, American literature as
separate entities; but Scottish literature was a mere provincial variant of
English. The "provincial" notion is easily enough dismissed.
Thomson, Burns, Scott, Byron, McDiarmid, Ian Hamilton Finlay: all enjoy (or
have enjoyed) a reputation in Europe and European Russia that few English
poets have shared – of living poets, perhaps only Geoffrey Hill. Provincial
literature tends to ape court or metropolitan literature; but in the case of
Scottish poetry (except for Gaelic) the traffic of borrowing has been
two-way. Surrey's Aeneid owes a debt to that of Gavin Douglas, one of the
few vernacular poets Shakespeare alludes to. The young Milton imitated
William Drummond. James Beattie's The Minstrel was a point d'appui for
Wordsworth as well as Byron. And the expressionist plays of James Barrie
dominated the London stage long before Continental drama made any similar
impact. Eliot's own conception of tradition, ironically, was probably
derived (as Crawford remarks) from the "provincial" Gregory Smith.
In view of these issues of hegemony, it should surprise no one that compiling
anthologies of Scottish poetry is sharply politicized. Hugh McDiarmid
intensified this with his splendid Golden Treasury of Scottish Verse (1940).
His polemical introduction and his gestures to Scottish Gaelic and Scottish
Latin (thirteen translations without originals, out of 138 poems) linked the
language issue with Scottish Nationalist politics: "some little effort
has been made to present an all-in view of Scottish poetry and in particular
to give some little representation to its Gaelic and Latin elements". "The
revival of the literary use of Scots has gone hand in hand with Scottish
nationalist political developments." McDiarmid's approach was
generously inclusive; he took "Scottish verse" to mean verse
written by Scots. (Medieval history not being his strong point, he even
claimed the Gawain poet for Scotland.)
McDiarmid exaggerates when he says that, if translations were available,
two-thirds of a representative anthology of Scottish literature would be "from
the Gaelic". But his choices were so well judged that The Golden
Treasury set a benchmark that his successors had to respond to. The Oxford
Book of Scottish Verse (1966), edited by John MacQueen and Tom Scott, prints
no Gaelic and Latin. Yet it has a political programme of its own, or, at
least, of Tom Scott's own. Taking "Scottish verse" so far as
possible to mean verse in Scots, The Oxford Book banishes the
English-oriented poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The
editors announce "the exclusion, or only nominal representation, of one
or two poets whose work seems to be more at home - like that of Drummond -
in the English tradition than in the Scottish". This policy counts
against Robert Ayton and the Castalian poets from the court of James VI, and
means cutting the English element of Burns to the bone. When Tom Scott on
his own edited The Penguin Book of Scottish Verse (1970), the laager was
confined more narrowly still: Ayton ("a mediocre versifier") gets
one page out of 500; Drummond (guilty of the treason of anglicizing on his
native soil) is exiled tout court. Inconsistently, James Thomson and others
who wrote in English after 1707 are pardoned; they are to show the influence
of the "Scottish tradition" on English poetry.
The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse embraces the "all-in"
principle. Indeed, the editors increase the proportion of translations,
including twenty-eight Gaelic and five Latin poems with attendant
translations: in effect, 130 out of 525 pages, or on a demographic basis,
twenty times the expected ratio. This Gaelic question is a thistly one. The
ancient importance of Gaelic culture makes McDiarmid's argument, that Scots
should know more about it, hard to contest. Moreover, the Gaelic is a great
literature in its own right. With a linguistic substrate as musical as
Greek, Gaelic poetry has developed principles of euphony more refined than
those of English and Scots. An overwhelming case clearly exists for an
anthology of Scottish Gaelic Verse; whether Gaelic should displace Scots and
English in an anthology of Scottish verse is another matter altogether.
Gaelic is no more indigenous than Scots; in many parts of Scotland, Gaelic
has never been spoken. One gets the impression that, in this respect, the
proportions of The New Penguin Book reflect a visionary nationalism, if not
a misty nostalgia. To print Aonghas Macneacail's poem "gaelic is alive"
does not make it so. As always, the costs of positive discrimination have to
be factored in. Has the Gaelic contribution really been greater than the
Latin? Has French made no contribution to Scottish culture?
These are difficult issues. Fortunately, The New Penguin Book is in
experienced hands. Both editors are Scots, and both have been selected for
the Penguin Modern Poets series. Imlah, whose Zoologist's Bath (1982) was
published by John Fuller's Sycamore Press, is author of Birthmarks (1988).
And Crawford, many-volumed poet and academic, wizard of the west-by-east and
spin-presenter of his country, besides being the author of Spirit Machine
(1999), shares two other volumes with W. N. Herbert. He has edited Other
Tongues (1990) and (with Simon Armitage) the tactfully titled Penguin Book
of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945 (1998). Surely such veterans
should be able to escape the Charybdis of chauvinistic nationalism and the
sharp rocks of petty censorious faction.
Their energetic, agreeably anarchic introduction promises well. Perhaps the
earlier history is a bit simplistic. The Kingdom of Scotland, it seems,
simply "grew" during the eleventh century. No warlords, no
dynastic struggles, no ferocious clan cleansing. The Lord of the Isles, long
regarded as a focus of lawless resistance to unification, is hidden away,
not appearing even for exoneration. Gaelic becomes, without supporting
argument, "the native tongue of most of Scotland"; Scots is
improbably limited to the south-east. The story told is of Scottish culture
declining through anglicization and eventually succumbing in the seventeenth
century. In the eighteenth century, however, attempts to suppress Gaelic
only refreshed the "secret literature" of a cause outwardly lost.
Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson figure as fighting, in their different
ways, "against the rule of English". Nothing about the successes
of Scottish Enlightenment culture, or the European fame of Thomson and Burns
and Byron. Scottish causes, one gets the impression, have always been nobly
lost. Even Burns's "simple" techniques led, through his epigones,
to Kailyard sentimentality.
On the later history, the editors carry more conviction. They sensibly
attribute the temporary decline of Scottish literature in the nineteenth
century to a failure to respond to the challenges of urbanization. The
twentieth-century "Scottish Renaissance" again produced
confrontational linguistic politics, with Edwin Muir's European rationality
pitted against the synthetic Scots programme of McDiarmid. Some may doubt
that this was McDiarmid's chief importance, rather than his intellectual
scope, say, or his engagements with science. The editors rightly describe
the language question as arousing less excitement towards the end of the
century. In the English verse of recent Scottish poets, they hear what
Stevenson called the "strong Scots accent of the mind". And they
finish interestingly with speculations about the common characteristics of
Scottish poetry and love of country in addition to preoccupation with
weather.
An anthology may not be "the greatest work which the soul of man is
capable to perform", but it can often be one of unobtrusive cultural
importance. For many readers, it embodies the effective canon: the everyday
canon of familiar, shared, quotable poems, and sometimes, too, an academic
canon of poems to be studied, edited, criticized and fought over. Canons,
far from being fixed by conservative establishments, are subject to
perpetual modification - adjustment to changes of taste, fashion and
circumstance, to the arrival of new generations of poets, or simply to the
market. In an age that overvalues novelty, a new anthology always stands a
good chance of success. This one, however, has rather more justification.
After all, it is three decades since the perverse choices of Tom Scott's
Penguin anthology: decades during which the nation's identity has been
morphing before our very eyes.
Some anthologists are inclined to go for poets that can be expected to make it
into the top ten: "major", "great" poets. As the
introduction to the Oxford Book put it, "the bulk of our limited space
has been given to the major figures at the expense of minor, where minor
works abound and major is scarce". Such a policy seems to me mistaken.
Besides the reasons given by Eliot in his 1944 Swansea lecture, I would add
another: that minor poets, besides being often more representative, may give
special pleasures. I should prefer the taste of a reader who enjoys Parnell
and Akenside, to that of a reader who despises anything less than
Wordsworth. Anyone can pick a major poet; choosing minor poets is a truer
test of readers and anthologists. Crawford and Imlah have the taste; but
they take so many side-trips to the Highlands that they have little room
left for tracing the Scottish tradition.
The space the editors have to distribute is so restricted that at times their
canon even remains unclear. Very few poets are represented by more than a
page or two. Before 1707, Robert Henryson (twenty-eight pages) and the
ballads, that great re-entrant angle into the Middle Ages, dominate all the
rest; even William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas get only half as many pages. Is
one to infer adverse judgments on Ayton and Drummond, Lindsay and the
Castalians? (Lindsay gets three pages, compared with fourteen in The Oxford
Book). And what judgments are implied by the five pages assigned to Barbour
and to James I (of The Kingis Quair) between them, compared with the
twenty-eight in The Oxford? If the Makars count as Renaissance poets (and
surely now they must), Barbour and James I are the chief medieval Scottish
poets. Another surprise is Dunbar's and Douglas's meagre allotments. Since
Dunbar is nevertheless called "the most gifted poetical craftsman
Scotland has ever produced", one may infer that in this anthology
poetical craft is not to get anyone very far. Allowance has to be made, of
course, for the different intensities of narrative and lyric.
After 1707, Burns stands out unchallenged (twenty-nine pages, compared with
McDiarmid's eighteen). A second rank (about nine each) rightly comprises
Fergusson, Davidson, James Thomson ("B.V."), Stevenson, Morgan,
McCaig, Sorley Maclean and Iain Crichton Smith, with Edwin Muir – again
rightly, it seems to me – set a little lower. (Maclean and Smith are
effectively penalized by having to make room for their translations.) The
rations for Scott, Byron, Andrew Young, W. S. Graham, Sydney Goodsir Smith
and Alastair Reid are strikingly ferruginous. And what can only be called a
starvation diet is the lot of George Mackay Brown, Douglas Dunn, Robert
Garioch, Ian Hamilton Finlay (two one-word poems) and William Soutar,
perhaps the finest craftsman of his generation. Frank Kuppner, Liz Lochhead
and Don Paterson would require more space to appear to advantage. Yet they
fare better than Robert Sempill (of the Habbie stanza), Burns Singer, Alan
Bold and, astonishingly, George Bruce and Hamish Henderson, all omitted.
It is hard, at first, to make literary reason of some of these rejections and
odd proportions. But making an anthology is a bit like packing a suitcase;
you have to discard things to achieve the temporary closure of a unitary
concept.
Gradually, one senses, among other proclivities of this anthology, a passion
for gathering undiscovered beauties at the cost of familiar ones. This is
partly justified by certain choices, such as Janet Hamilton, William
Anderson and James Robertson, not in earlier anthologies. These are welcome
newcomers. So is Alexander Smith:
In every orchard Autumn stands,
With apples in his golden hands.
But, in other cases, the dangers of novelty threaten. Marion Berstein can only
have been included for her attack on blood sports, not for her poetry.
Generally, the editors' positive impulses are sounder than their negative
ones. Their selections from diminished poets are unadventurous.
Which brings us to the debatable lands of Hawthornden. The importance of
Drummond in the history of Scottish poetry is beyond question. Easily the
most European poet in Scotland until McDiarmid, he was an excellent
linguist, able to bring home spoils from Italian, French and Spanish
literatures, and to produce sophisticated, mellifluous poetry of great
variety, ranging from lyric refinement to robust invective. Often mistaken
for a belated Petrarchist, he belongs rather to the European baroque
tradition. Instead of following the court, Drummond remained in Scotland,
where he made Hawthornden, with its neo-Latin library, the centre of what
James MacQueen has called "a mini-Renaissance in Scottish Latinity".
Drummond kept Scottish verse going, in the absence of the court. Certainly
he knew the Petrarchisti; but he was steeped in Du Bartas and Theophile, and
the baroque of Tasso and Marino. More au fait with European literary fashion
than Jonson and Donne were, he pointed a way to the smoother verse of the
next age. As a student, Milton sought out his manuscripts and imitated them
in some of his best early lyrics.
Drummond is represented here by three sonnets and a shorter lyric, together
with "Polemo-Middinia", a poem not certainly his and calling for
translation.
Presumably the editors want to change our idea of Drummond to one earthier and
less refined. This coarse, local, very Scottish mock epic, with its prolepic
hints of Cotton and of Gay's Trivia, is worth printing in full, although it
hardly illustrates Drummond's characteristics: "In cartis yockato
omnes, extrahito muckam/Crofta per et agros Nebernae transque fenestras".
I enjoy crudites as well as the next person before a meal. But where's the
bloody meal here? No Forth Feasting; no Flowers of Sion; hardly a religious
poem.
Not surprisingly, the favoured poets are favoured with sound, well
proportioned selections. Henryson could hardly be better represented: "The
Two Mice" and The Testament of Cresseid entire, with a passage from "Orpheus
and Eurydice". On the other hand, one looks in vain for Dunbar's "Tua
Maritt Wemen and the Wedo", or anything from Douglas's Virgil
translation. The selection of McDiarmid, again, is well judged – several "golden
lyrics"; "On a Raised Beach"; and "A Drunk Man Looks at
the Thistle" (rightly held to two pages) – although some will miss the
late philosophical poems. But the Sorley Maclean choices disappoint: nothing
from "The Woods of Raasay". Various aspects of Edwin Morgan's work
are displayed: the reversed hypograms of "Message Clear"; the
deceptive linguistic joke in "The Loch Ness Monster's Song"; the
virtuoso scherzo on Cinquevalli; and (in an sf mode) "The First Men on
Mercury". But a preference for the light Morgan ousts the dark Glasgow
Sonnets.
The editors illustrate in many interesting ways Scottish poetry's special
concern with language. It shows, obviously, in the translated and macaronic
poems, and in "gaelic is alive". But it also appears in Morgan's
and Herbert's linguistic experiments and in Tom Leonard's artificially
graphed phonetic Scots. The editors seem to think Scottish poets have had to
search for the real language of men more than Wordsworth did: a thesis that
might have been strengthened by sampling Scottish renderings of foreign
poetry. For, as the introduction notices, "Scottish poetry has been
notably active in translation".
Translators have been prominent in most periods: one thinks of Douglas's
Eneados; John Stewart's Orlando Furioso; William Fowler's Trionfi;
Urquhart's Rabelais; Scott's German ballads; Garioch's Belli; Morgan's
translations from east European languages, to say nothing of Alastair Reid's
Neruda. What hindered? Lack of space, of course. But also, maybe, a trace of
Larkinian insularity. The anthology tends to locate Scottish poetry in
relation to English rather than to French, or Italian. (Janet Hamilton is
in, but the Anthony Hamilton praised by Voltaire is not.) Think of the
torrent of recent translations that might have been drawn on! – Douglas
Young's from the Greek; Goodsir Smith's and Tom Scott's from the French;
George Kay's from Montale; Soutar's, Mackie's and Peter France's from the
Russian; Robin Fulton's from Norwegian and Swedish.
The translation from Arthur Johnston's Ad Robertum Baronium shows Crawford's
own propensities in this direction. It is no crib but rather a free
imitation, seizing opportunities for witty invention:
I trek behind my oxen's lines,
Goading them on or chanting verse,
Teaching the ox boustrophedon.
None of this is in the Latin, which instead expresses contempt for the
stupidum . . . pecus. Perhaps Crawford disliked this elitism; perhaps he
could not resist the boustrophedon joke.
A related characteristic is rightly found in the activities of editing and
anthologizing. Drummond, Allan Ramsay, Burns and Scott all collected older
poetry and song. The editors and anthologizers include Henryson (he of the
allegorizing commentaries); Scott, again; James Robertson; Hugh McDiarmid;
and Douglas Dunn. (And Crawford and Imlah, who scrupulously disqualify
themselves.) Burns's dominating position has something to do with the same
characteristic. Yet, unlike Burns, the editors have little enthusiasm for
the demotic - unless, indeed, it is held at arm's length by linguistic
manoeuvres like Leonard's. And their partiality to sweet, simple, lyric
sincerity (one of the strengths of Scottish poetry) is not marked. Even in
the capacious Burns selection, this element, although certainly present ("Mary
Morrison", "A Red, Red Rose"), hardly stands out.
Unsophisticated feeling is held in, the kailyard tarmacked over.
In their treatment of texts, the editors, for all their innovations, shun
modernizing, even when it would be harmless. Printing "Rvnne
(Sheepheards) run where Bethleme blest appeares" does nothing to make
Drummond's line accessible. Modernizing, of course, meets with many
obstacles; not least the problems of orthography, which have bedevilled
every anthology of Scottish poetry. Here, they are sidestepped: "Scots
does not exist as a standarized national or international language; indeed
part of the pleasure or point of writing in Scots for some poets has been
its orthographical fluidity." "Orthographical fluidity" is a
licence which may have to be granted to some poets, but it easily becomes
self-defeating licentiousness, a sort of regional self-indulgence. Its
anarchy militates against appreciation of Scottish poetry outside of
Scotland. Is the issue of anglicizing too prickly? Or do the editors share
the current heedlessness about such pedantries as spelling?
This is a serious and interesting, although not a momentous anthology.
Admirably catholic in its tastes, it develops many ideas – more than Tom
Scott's or Roderick Watson's. Without troubling much about
representativeness, it offers a selection of engaging individual poems,
likely to attract some who seldom read Scottish poetry. Its choices are
markedly independent, sometimes running against both traditional evaluations
and the counter-orthodoxy of McDiarmid. Its image of Scottish poetry is to
the contemporary taste: biased towards loosely written, uneuphonious verse.
This is not to say it is a bag of novelties, or meant only for the nonce.
But, understandably, it means to appeal to a new generation. And its
considered changes of mood (from tenderness to hilarity, aggression to
compassion) succeed in this, while giving, from time to time, surprising
glimpses of the poetry's rich variety – and of its fun. More of its choices
are humorous than its predecessors' were, as many provocative or
challenging. If the balance is wrong at all, this is perhaps from striving
too strenuously after local, non-English qualities (the people of Hamnavoe
and of Scotstarvet will feel this is their anthology). Not that Scottish
poetry could ever be too Scottish. But abstraction, intellectuality,
scientific rationality and devout, exalted vision are probably commoner
qualities in Scottish poetry than are fully illustrated here.
