Scottish Renaissance - Beginnings

Beginnings

The term "Scottish Renaissance" is most frequently said to have been coined by the French Languedoc poet and scholar Denis Saurat in his article "Le Groupe de la Renaissance Écossaise", which was published in the Revue Anglo-Américaine in April 1924. The term had appeared much earlier, however, in the work of the polymathic Patrick Geddes and in a 1922 book review by Christopher Murray Grieve ("Hugh MacDiarmid") for the Scottish Chapbook that predicted a "Scottish Renascence as swift and irresistible as was the Belgian Revival between 1880 and 1910."

These earlier references make clear the connections between the Scottish Renaissance and the Celtic Twilight and Celtic Revival movements of the late 19th century, which helped reawaken a spirit of cultural nationalism among Scots of the modernist generations. Where these earlier movements had been steeped in a sentimental and nostalgic Celticism, however, the modernist-influenced Renaissance would seek a rebirth of Scottish national culture that would both look back to the medieval "makar" poets William Dunbar and Robert Henrysoun as well as look towards such contemporary influences as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and D. H. Lawrence.

The turn of the 20th century saw the first stirrings of a new era in Scottish arts and letters. As writers such as George Douglas Brown railed against the "Kailyard school" that had come to dominate Scottish letters, producing satiric, realist accounts of Scottish rural life in novels like The House with the Green Shutters (1901), Scots language poets such as Violet Jacob and Marion Angus undertook a quiet revival of regionally inflected poetry in the Lowland vernacular. The aforementioned Patrick Geddes would continue his foundational work in town and regional planning, developing the triad "Place - Work - Folk" as a matrix for new thinking about the relationships between people and their local environments. In the realm of visual arts, John Duncan would refine his Celtic myth inspired Symbolist painting to include an increasing emphasis on collage and the flatness of the image, while his younger colleague John Duncan Fergusson would explore the Impressionist and Fauvist techniques that would lead eventually to the founding of the Scottish Colourists group. In the early 1910s, the young Stanley Cursiter would begin a series of paintings that reflected the contemporary continental movements of Futurism and Vorticism. In architecture and the decorative arts, the towering figures of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow Four would give Scotland its very own "school" of modern design and help create the "Glasgow style". Scotland in the early 20th century was experiencing an efflorescence of creative activity, but there was not yet a sense of a particular shared movement or an overt national inflection to all of this artistic effort.

It was not until the literary efforts of Hugh MacDiarmid that the Scottish Renaissance can properly be said to have begun. Starting in 1920, C. M. Grieve (having not yet adopted his nom de plume of Hugh MacDiarmid) began publishing a series of three short anthologies entitled Northern Numbers: Being Representative Selections from Certain Living Scottish Poets (including works by John Buchan, Violet Jacob, Neil Munro, and Grieve himself). These anthologies, which appeared one each year from 1920–22, along with his founding and editing of the Scottish Chapbook review (in the annus mirabilis of Modernism, 1922), established Grieve/MacDiarmid as the father and central figure of the burgeoning Scottish Renaissance movement that he had prophesied.

By about 1925, MacDiarmid had largely abandoned his English language poetry and began to write in a kind of "synthetic Scots" known as Lallans, that was a hybrid of regional Scots dialects and lexicographical artifacts exhumed from Jamieson's Dictionary of the Scottish Language, often grafted onto a Standard English grammatical structure.

This had an electrifying effect on the literary landscape of the time. Other poets, among them Sydney Goodsir Smith and William Soutar, soon followed in MacDiarmid's footsteps and also wrote in Lallans. Although sometimes accused of neglecting the Gaelic side of Scotland's linguistic identity, actually the writers of Scots language poetry inspired poets in the Scottish Gaelic language too, and its more positive effects on that literature are still being felt.

MacDiarmid's influence, however, went much further than this. By networking and bringing writers together he managed to create the sense of a literary movement in Scotland of writers with shared aims. Neil M. Gunn, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Edwin Muir (an Orcadian man of letters not drawn into Lallans writing), Sorley MacLean (Somhairle MacGill-Eain) and many others felt the benefit of his influence, and are also generally referred to as being part of the Renaissance.

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