Hugh Macdiarmid Quotes

And until that day comes every true man's place/ is to reject all else and be with the lowest,/ the poorest - in the bottom of that deepest of wells/ in which alone is truth; in which is truth only - truth that should shine like the sun,/ with a monopoly of movement, and a sound like talking to God.

We are so easily baffled by appearances And do not realize that these stones are one with the stars.

For Scotland is made out of cities and the country and the sea, which means It's so much more, as an imagined space, a geography of the mind, Than its centres of population. Demographics are never enough And the way in which this might best be imagined starts In the work of Hugh MacDiarmid. And the poets and artists Who followed from that. Not as disciples. As students. As witnesses As thinking men and women, who understand the depths, complexities Subtleties and strengths and the cosmic clock, All the resources there, and all the risks required. from 'Scotland's Voices

The disjuncture from politics, on the other hand, springs from something which concerns all these poets: the shattered nature of Scottish consciousness, which isn't a low flat floor of peasant culture on which all stand together but a wild junk-yard of high culture fragments, English imports, oral traditions of 'the Scots commons' and proletarian 'socialist realism' from the thirties.

It requires great love of it deeply to read The configuration of a land, Gradually grow conscious of fine shadings, Of great meanings in slight symbols, Hear at last the great voice that speaks softly, See the swell and fall upon the flank Of a statue carved out in a whole country’s marble, Be like Spring, like a hand in a window Moving New and Old things carefully to and fro, Moving a fraction of flower here, Placing an inch of air there, And without breaking anything. So I have gathered unto myself All the loose ends of Scotland, And by naming them and accepting them, Loving them and identifying myself with them, Attempt to express the whole.

We have no use for emotions, let alone sentiments, but are solely concerned with passions.

For ilka thing a man can be or think or dae Aye leaves a million mair unbeen, unthocht, undune.

And let the lesson be - to be yersel's, Ye needna fash gin it's to be ocht else. To be yersel's - and to mak' that worth bein' Nae harder job to mortals has been gi'en.

For ilka thing a man can be or think or dae Aye leaves a million mair unbeen, unthocht, undune,

The Scots poet Hugh MacDiarmid believed that it was a mark of distinction to be able to hold two opposing points of view simultaneously.

The [Second World] war may thus have acted as a forcing-bed, bringing to somewhat speedier development what was already securely rooted in the circumstances of our nation; and in this sense it may, perhaps, be said that: "The Scottish Renaissance was conceived in the First World War and sprang into lusty life in the Second World War.

Wan decade frae wir last self-defeatin referendum, we're close tae hae the centenary ae MacDiarmid's masterpiece, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. Oan the man's daith, Norman MacCaig said they should observe twa minutes' pandemonium. Fine description ae MacDiarmid himself, as much as whit he unleashed. MacDiarmid wiss Scotland's ultimate political poet. We winna rehearse the man's mony faults here - "problematic", says Heaney. Aye. And in spite ae this, MacDiarmid's mair important tae the cause ae Scots and Scotland than ony ither poet frae the previous century. "My job, as I see it, has never been to lay a tit's egg, but to erupt like a volcano, emitting not only flame, but a lot of rubbish." And that's hou Mount MacDiarmid maun be regarded: tempted as we may be tae tak oot the rubbish, we canna thraw the hail lot awa, as wull shairly be settin the bins ablaze. An whit's mair self-defeatin nor a bin fire?