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Hugh MacDiarmid and Scottish Cultural Renaissance

BBC - History - Scottish History & Scottish Cultural Renaissance Strangely enough, in the midst of such poverty and hardship, the inter-war years are considered by many academics to be the source of a new Scottish cultural renaissance. It was, at least, a revival in literary terms, led by the poet CM Grieve, or Hugh MacDiarmid, as he was better known. MacDiarmid’s poetic mission was no less than the cultural reawakening of Scotland, which he considered to be, in its present state, a pathetic parody of an older Scotland dressed in tartan- a collection cultural dregs caused by indulgence in sentimental notions of Scottishness. In his attempts to encourage cultural confidence, MacDiarmid thought it necessary to free Scotland from the yoke of Anglicisation which had effectively quashed any new and original expressions of national character for hundreds of years. To achieve this he adopted the use of the Old Scots Tongue, or ‘Lallans’ as the new form came to be known, which was a synthetic idiom borrowing from many different varieties of the Scots language, spoken at different times in different parts of the country. Although he also wrote poetry in English, much of his best work is written in Scots, including

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