A Short Introduction to Scottish Literature

by Sydney Goodsir Smith

Based on four broadcast talks, this essay presents a Scottish poet's interpretation of the essential nature of the Scots tradition as being a popular rather than a literary one. It seeks to define the peculiar characteristics of the literature of Scotland from its beginnings to the present day; to define that part of the tradition which is particularly Scottish, that essence, or temper, or quiddity which, whenever it has been neglected or smothered, has resulted in a period of sterility.Goodsir Smith draws his examples from three fairly distinct firstly, the period up to the Union of the Crowns in 1603, secondly, the eighteenth century revival continuing into the early nineteenth century in the work of Walter Scott and his contemporaries; and thirdly, after a glance at the desert of the nineteenth century, the literary movement of the twentieth century.

40 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1951

About the author

Sydney Goodsir Smith was a Scottish poet, artist, dramatist and novelist. He wrote poetry in Scots and was a major figure of the Scottish Renaissance.

He studied medicine at Edinburgh, history at Oxford and art in Italy. His published work includes three volumes of poems, Skail Wind (1941), The Wanderer (1943) and The Deevil's Waltz (1946); a book of lyrics, Late into the Night (1947); a comic novel set in Edinburgh, Carotid Cornucopius (1947); and the long poem, Under the Eildon Tree (1948).

Smith was one of the outstanding poets of his generation. He gained a Rockefeller Atlantic Award in 1947, and in 1951 was one of the prize-winners in the Festival of Britain Scots Poetry Competition organised by the Arts Council.

Reviews

[Graeme · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this essay, based on four radio broadcasts, Sydney Goodsir Smith focuses on the “golden age” of the fifteenth and sixteenth century Makars, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth Century literary revival of Burns, Scott and their contemporaries, and the twentieth century Scottish Renaissance, with particular emphasis on literary Scots.

He argues that the Classical Revival of the Renaissance affected Scotland less than other countries in Western Europe and that, as a consequence, a Medieval Gothic sensibility, retaining a powerful Celtic influence, was perpetuated in Scottish popular culture through vehicles such as the Border Ballads, to be revived in the literature of the eighteenth century by figures such as Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson, Robert Burns and Walter Scott.

Smith follows Hugh MacDiarmid in rejecting the “dialect” tradition which stubbornly persists in the Scots language movement even to the present day. He points out that MacDiarmid’s advocacy of “Synthetic Scots” was a revolutionary attempt to give contemporary writers access to the rich resources and range of the language as the Makars had used it.

Smith strongly identifies with Edinburgh and clearly sees himself as a metropolitan writer, an heir to the Scotland of William Dunbar and similarly engaged with the intellectual concerns of the European comity of nations. Like MacDiarmid, he sees Burns as culturally limited by his rural background. He makes only fleeting reference to John Galt and none at all to James Hogg or William Alexander. For Smith, the greater part of the nineteenth century is a literary desert, populated only by kailyard hacks and curiosities such as Thomas Carlyle and William MacGonagall.