Urban Scotland in Hugh MacDiarmid’s Glasgow Poems

Hugh MacDiarmid is sometimes still thought a parochial poet, mostly interested in the depiction of rural Scotland. However, in the 1930s, he wrote several poems about the city of Glasgow but his work on urban predicaments has been largely forgotten. In his Glasgow sequence, MacDiarmid, along with many other writers in the 30s, redefines Scotland as an urban nation. Post-industrial Glasgow urges the whole country to “re-write” itself and the canonical representation of rural Scotland to fade away. Scotland is mercilessly deconstructed in “Glasgow 1938”: Glasgow is no longer “a dear green place”, Scotland no longer a land of peasants but urban hell where filthy disease and dirty capitalism spread around, murdering creation and culture. The stones of Glasgow reveal the betrayal of old Scotland, whose imaginative voice has been muted by sentimentality, Anglo-Scottish education and Calvinism. But even through scathing criticism, it is the need to “re-write” Scotland as a cradle of cultural and political change that emerges. How to “re-write” a nation? By letting anger and its poetical rhythm redefine Scotland and turn it into a communist city of light. The style and syntax of the Glasgow poems tend, not only to express meaning, but to perform. This attempt at writing a long poem stems from MacDiarmid’s experiments to rebuild Scotland anew, from his faith in the political and performative power of his poetry. To “re-write” Scotland means to “re-create” it.