Diardaoin 16.06.11 Thursday (10:15 - 11:00)

Douglas Gifford, University of Glasgow

War, Renaissance and Three Great Scottish Poets : Sorley Maclean, George Campbell Hay, and Hamish Henderson  

This talk considers the work of three of Scotland’s greatest poets in the twentieth century. They also happen to be the three greatest war poets of the Second World War, and to have experienced the war mainly in the deserts of North Africa. What was it in this shared experience which produced such magnificent poetry? And how did they come to share also a profound humanity which increasingly refused to distinguish between friends and foes, seeing instead a common and tragic destiny?

The three were, of course, outstanding participants in what Hugh MacDiarmid termed ‘The Scottish Renaissance’, which developed in the 1920s and through the war years until the late 1940s. They may have seen war from remarkably similar perspectives; but did these shared perspectives last on their return to Scotland? The work of this fascinating trio reveals a complex variety of responses to modern Scotland, raising issues of culture, language and politics which are still vital today.  

Diardaoin 16.06.11 Thursday (15:30 - 16:15)

Christopher Whyte

An Cuilithionn 1939: Choreography, oreography and political responsibility.

Readers of MacLean's 'An Cuilithionn' must sooner or later confront two paradoxes.  First, it is a dream poem about political commitment, a visionary, even hallucinatory homage to the ideal of violent revolutionary change which so fascinated the political imagination of Europe during two centuries, from the storming of the Bastille in 1789 to the dismantling of the Berlin wall in 1989. Like MacDiarmid's 'The Seamless Garment', or his 'Hymns to Lenin', this is a totalitarian poem, in the sense not of being written under a totalitarian regime, but of explicitly advocating totalitarian measures in politics. 

Second, though taking a mountain range as its central, unifying image, the poem is pervaded by richly orchestrated movement of different kinds. So one can speak of its combination of 'choreography', structured, meaningful dance, with 'oreography', the detailed description of hills or mountains. Not just the Cuillins themselves, but the Stallion at Neist Point, a more agile representative of related values, the bog at Mararaulin which embodies the opposing forces of bourgeois repression and international capitalism, and an extended range of human figures associated with both sides leap, walk and dance their way from paragraph to verse paragraph. 

Though MacLean was later to claim he had left the poem unfinished, its subtle architectonics, deploying individual words like leitmotifs or shorter musical nuclei, plus overall effects of balance and contrast, present a strong argument for considering 'An Cuilithionn' a complete and consummate verbal artefact. While the poem shows MacLean moving beyond the specifically Modernist preoccupations of his love sequence, the 'Dàin do Eimhir', its aspirations as leftist tract challenge us to attempt a sober, retrospective evaluation of the cultural expressions and achievements of Scottish leftism throughout the 20th century.

Dihaoine 17.06.11 Friday (09:30 - 10:45)

Murdo MacDonald, Duncan of Jordanstone, University of Dundee

From Carmina Gadelica to Dain do Eimhir: the Visual Tradition

William Crosbie’s images for the first edition of Sorley MacLean’s Dàin do Eimhir match the European vision of the poetry. That outstanding combination of word and image, published by William McLellan in1943, prefigures recent projects such as An Leabhar Mòr / The Great Book of Gaelic. But the first edition of Dàin do Eimhir also built on a sustained exploration of the visual aspects of Gaelic culture of which the first edition of Alexander Carmichael’s Carmina Gadelica is a key example. That was published in 1900 and has initial letters and other embellishments of the highest quality drawn by Alexander Carmichael’s wife, Mary.

These designs take their inspiration, for the most part, from the illuminated manuscripts of the Gàidhealtachd. Carmina Gadelica is one of the great books both of the Scottish Celtic Revival and of the British Arts and Crafts Movement (although it is rarely considered in either context). In this paper I will explore the visual context of Carmina Gadelica and Dàin doEimhir and address the issue of the neglected visual tradition of the Scottish Gàidhealtchd.

Dihaoine 17.06.11 Friday (14:00 - 14:45)

Máire Ní Annracháin, University College Dublin

Not only the honeysuckle: Recurrent images in the poetry of Sorley MacLean

In one of his later poems, ‘Iadhshlat’, Sorley MacLean wrote that it had been fifty years since he first ‘plucked honeysuckle because of her’, evoking the earlier very short poem ‘Abhainn Arois’, in which he said he could recall nothing of what the beloved had said during a visit to Suidhisnis and the Aros Burn, just the scent of the honeysuckle and the bog myrtle. The heady fragrance of the honeysuckle is not the only image to which MacLean returned throughout his poetic career. Other images were more insistent, and dominated his entire work. Two of the most recurrent and the most multifaceted were the quest, and a type of otherworldly or quasi-otherworldly vision.

This paper will revisit material presented initially in Aisling agus Tóir: an slánú i bhfilíocht Shomhairle MhicGill-Eain, an Irish-language study of the vision and the quest in MacLean’s work which, although published initially in 1992, was never translated into English. It will argue that the tension between those two impulses underlies a significant portion of the work, and in particular the poems that have acquired the highest status over the decades, including ‘Coilltean Ratharsair’, ‘Hallaig’, ‘Coin is Madaidhean Allaidh’, ‘Uamh’ an Oir’.