Culture and the City: Poetry, Painting and Music in 1960s Glasgow

Abstract

After a brief reminder of Glasgow's post-World War One situation, and the literary renaissance initiated by MacDiarmid in the interwar period, the principal focus of this chapter will be the new developments which took place in the creative arts of poetry and painting, and in the professionalisation of classical music performance and education in 1960s Glasgow. It will propose that this relatively undocumented period in the city's cultural history was a significant player in the development of the confident Glasgow identity visible today, as well as making an important contribution to the future development of culture in Scotland as a whole.Keywords: Scottish poetry, music in Glasgow, Glasgow art scene, 1960s.By the mid-twentieth century, Glasgow no longer could be characterised as the 'second city of the Empire' as in Victorian times. Indeed its industrial decline would have been recognised more acutely earlier in the new century had not World War One brought a renewed need for armaments and related industrial materials. During the 1920s and 1930s, however, the city's retreat from prosperity and entrepreneurial activity became all too clear: a situation later exacerbated by the privations of World War Two. William Montgomerie's poem 'Glasgow Street' (1933) succeeds in keeping hope alive in the midst of such degeneration - 'Out of this ugliness may come / some day so beautiful a flower / that men will wonder at that hour / remembering smoke and flowerless slum' - while at the same time pointing to the apparent inability of Scotland's poets to engage with urban problems: 'But why were all the poets dumb?'1Montgomerie's interwar period had seen the growth of the movement popularly known in its own time as the 'Scottish Renaissance' which aimed to reconnect Scotland with its Scottish and European cultural heritage and remove it from its current status as provincial 'North Britain'. Although this movement had a revitalising effect on Scottish literature in particular, interacting with the postindustrial city and its slums was not one of its outstanding cultural successes. This was especially the case in regard to poetry, although writers such as James Barke and George Blake made creditable attempts to capture the city environment in their fiction of the 1930s as did Lewis Grassic Gibbon in Grey Granite (1934), the final book of his trilogy A Scots Quair. The city of Glasgow did make a contribution to a new phase of the interwar cultural renaissance in the 1940s and 1950s in that it produced in William Maclellan the kind of adventurous cultural publisher Scotland had long needed. It was Maclellan's magazines such as Poetry Scotland and Scottish Art and Letters, and his publication of important works such as Sorley MacLean's Dain do Eimhir {Poems to Eimhir) of 1943 and MacDiarmid's In Memoriam James Joyce of 1955, that helped to encourage and promote this later phase of the interwar Scottish poetry revival, including a new group of poets writing in Scots. Yet, as with the earlier revival, this new work did not seem ready or able to tackle themes relating to the industrial city and its urbanised environs. We have to wait until the supposedly 'swinging sixties' before we find a post-industrialised city such as Glasgow taking front stage in the new poetry of the decade while at the same time providing a forum for cultural experimentation and development in other art forms. This chapter will consider the reformation which took place in Glasgow in the 1960s in poetry, painting, and classical music, and will suggest that this relatively unacknowledged period in the city's cultural history was a significant player in the development of the confident Glasgow identity visible today.In 'The Beatnik in the Kailyaird', published in the magazine New Saltire in 1962, and 'Scottish Poetry in the 1960s', published ten years later in British Poetry Since 1960, Edwin Morgan addressed the question of literary directions for a new age. …