The Scottish Sixties

Abstract

This was an intermediary but vital period of cultural change. The young Scottish poets of the late sixties (including D.M. Black, Alan Jackson, Kenneth White; Robin Fulton, and the first appearances of Tom Leonard and Liz Lochhead) heralded this new spirit -very much of its time- and took us beyond the familiar arguments for and against the use of Scots, beyond the Renaissance agendas of national psychology and identity.Keywords: Ian Hamilton Finlay, Edwin Morgan, D.M. Black, Alan Jackson, Kenneth White, Robin Fulton, Duncan Glen, Alastair Mackie, Stewart Conn, Tom Leonard, Liz Lochhead, The 1962 Edinburgh International Writers' Conference, Hugh MacDiarmid, Alexander Trocchi, William Burroughs.'The old coats are discarded. / The old ice is loosed. / The old seeds are awake.'1 This is how it seemed to Edwin Morgan in The Second Life when the book was published in 1968. The title poem had deep personal significance for him in his journey towards articulating the many things that are 'unspoken / in the life of a man', in a collection that marked his arrival - at the age of forty-eight - as an undoubtedly major poet. The Second Life could be said to be the most significant Scottish poetic production of the decade, as game changing in its way as the publication of Lanark in 1981. If in later years Morgan came to reconsider his optimism about the new tower blocks that were rising from the slums of old Glasgow, his poem still perfectly captures the optimism of the time.There are so many myths about the 1960s that commentators are advised to preserve a degree of scepticism in trying to summarise the period.2 It should be remembered that for many people in Britain the cultural and material experience of the decade - especially in its first half - was little different from what they had known in the 1950s. And yet it was still a decade of extraordinary change, running from the rise of the Berlin wall to Armstrong's landing on the moon, and by 1968 in particular, the cultural scene was very different from what it had been in 1958. It was the year of the Prague spring, of the Tet offensive and My Lai in Vietnam; of barricades in Paris and student unrest in Britain, Europe and North America; it saw the rise of Black Power and civil marches in Northern Ireland, the assassination of Martin Luther King, the proliferation of the hydrogen bomb and the birth of the Khmer Rouge. It was the year that men first gazed on the dark side of the moon.Popular musical culture, so much associated with the 1960s, had travelled almost as far in the same ten years, from the Kingston Trio's 'Tom Dooley' to Pink Floyd, who 'Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun' in a droning wash of electronic noise and sombre vocals, with lines appropriated from ninth century Chinese poets.3 By 1968 the Beatles were close to the end of their studio career, having moved from 'Please Please Me' to the White Album, and Bob Dylan had shifted from folk music to the extraordinary free-associative electric modernism of Bringing it All Back Home (1965), Highway 61 Revisited (1965) and Blonde on Blonde (1966).4 Having explored the 'mythologies' of popular culture, by 1968 Roland Barthes was now proposing the 'death of the author', while Jim Morrison and the Doors were referencing Rimbaud's dislocation of the senses and the brooding homicidal paranoia of 'The End'.These few examples will have to suffice to indicate a period during which at least some branches of popular music demonstrated an eclectic and intensely literary character, adopting the fragmented imagery, the expressionistic force and the associative or surreal connections that had last been seen in French Symbolisme or the modemist poetry of the 1920s. That such expressions were often flying under the flag of supposedly mind-expanding drugs should not obscure the fact that they are still manifestations of previously established avant-garde literary techniques. While it can be argued that the 'avant-garde' features of the early twenties were merely being appropriated to commercial ends and a shallow boho style, it is still the case, nevertheless, that the structural techniques and dissonances of early modernism were becoming familiar to much wider audiences when they were rediscovered (or recycled) in popular formats in the 1960s. …