MacDiarmid and Muir:Scottish Modernism and the Nation as Anthropological Site

Abstract

The cosmopolitan and international dimension oF European modern ism was oFten paradoxically bound to an acute concern with local and national cultures. Marinetti's projected renovation oF Italian culture, Yeats's politically engaged drama and poetry, and Joyce's attention to the minu tiae oF Dublin's life and language suggest that an engagement with questions oF national identity Forms a crucial part oFthe modernist project. Such ques tions are particularly acute For historically colonized nations such as Ireland but also For a country like Scotland, For long a willing partner in the United Kingdom, but one where incipient national aspirations lacked the autonomous institutions necessary For political expression: only in 1997 did Scots vote For the restoration oF limited selF-government. The question oF Forging a post imperial identity For Scotland arose much earlier in the century, however, and the contemporary devolution oF powers within the U.K. is prefigured in the work oF many modern Scottish writers, none more than CM. Grieve, better known by his pseudonym, Hugh MacDiarmid. Both modernism and nationalism in Scotland Found their major exponent in MacDiarmid, whose 1926 poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle ofFers a searching exploration oF Scottish identity. MacDiarmid's major Scottish contemporary, Edwin Muir, assesses the possibility oF national independence From a much more skeptical perspective in his poetry and cultural criticism. Muir's achievement has not been Fully assessed in the context oF Scottish modernism, which has tended to be identified almost exclusively with MacDiarmid's Scottish Renaissance movement. Consequently, the proFound affinities in their diagnoses oF the modern Scottish condition have not been explored, yet it is here that the two