Hugh MacDiarmid and Chambers's Twentieth Century Dictionary1

Abstract

IT has long been acknowledged that Hugh MacDiarmid drew directly upon dictionaries in writing his poems in ‘synthetic Scots’ and, in the volume Stony Limits and Other Poems (1934), in ‘synthetic English’. In many cases his poems were built around phrases he had found in the dictionaries’ definitions or illustrative quotations. The important Scots dictionaries were Sir James Wilson's Lowland Scotch, Jamieson's Etymological Dictionary, and Longmuir's expanded revision of Jamieson.2 Of the English dictionaries, one was identified by McQuillan as Wyld's Universal Dictionary of the English Language. Recognizing that many of the ‘recondite words’ in Stony Limits are not to be found in Wyld, McQuillan deduced that MacDiarmid had also used Chambers's Twentieth Century Dictionary (hereafter Chambers) in the edition edited by Rev. Thomas Davidson.3 McQuillan's discovery is significant, not only because it enables us to read the exact definition known to MacDiarmid, but also because it sheds light on passages ‘where the dictionary meanings become an integral part of the subtle play of reference in the poem’.4 McQuillan notes the passage in ‘On a Raised Beach’ where the poet, surveying the barren beach, says ‘Conjure a fescue to teach me with from this / And I will listen to you’. Davidson defines ‘fescue’ not only as ‘a genus of grasses’, but also ‘a small straw or wire used to point out letters when learning to read’.