Ian Hamilton Finlay: Scottish Futurist

Chapter 2 examines the formative period in Ian Hamilton Finlay’s career when he encountered the work of like-minded poets in the United States, including Niedecker. Chapter 2 argues that Finlay’s use of folk forms in his poetry during the late 1950s articulates a critical response to the orthodoxies of the ‘Scottish Renaissance’ at that time. Finlay counters what he perceived as the Renaissance’s cultural myopia and literary pretensions by developing a faux-naif folk poetry that consciously evoked the doggerel of the Scottish poet William McGonagall, as well as with an early twentieth-century Russian avant-garde. In doing so, this chapter argues, Finlay strategically situates his work in an international tradition of avant-garde innovation that subverts Renaissance nationalism.