Whaur Extremes Meet: The Poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid, 1920 - 1934

by Catherine Kerrigan, John MacQueen (Foreword)

This book places MacDiarmid as a great poet in the Romantic tradition. He is seen in the cultured and historical context of the early modern period, and we are given a vivid picture of his relationship to the Scottish tradition in poetry and politics.

260 pages, Hardcover

First published April 7, 1983

About the author

Professor Catherine Kerrigan (1939 - 2017) came to attention in the 1980s after taking her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees as a mature student and then going on to make a significant contribution to Scottish literary studies. Catherine was the fourth child in a family of ten, seven of whom lived to adulthood. As a child she attended St. Ninian's Primary School and went on to Notre Dame High School in Glasgow, situated close to Charles Rennie Mackintosh's famous School of Art. She left school at sixteen and worked first as a shorthand typist for British Rail before training in nursing and maternity care in Glasgow and London. When she was just over twenty-one she emigrated to Canada, where an aunt and an older sister had preceded her and a younger brother later followed her.

Canada provided Catherine with the opportunities she had not found at home. Having initially supported herself by working in Toronto as a nurse, she embarked on English Literature studies at the University of Toronto in the 1960s and 1970s, gaining her BA and MA degrees there. She subsequently returned to Scotland where she did doctoral research on the poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid under the supervision of Professor John MacQueen of the School of Scottish Studies and was awarded her PhD degree from the University of Edinburgh in 1981. MacQueen had met Cathie in Toronto at the annual meeting of the Learned Societies, representing the subjects and disciplines of Canadian universities. He was impressed with her qualities, and encouraged her to make MacDiarmid the subject of her PhD. Her first book, Whaur Extremes Meet: The Poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid 1920 - 1934, published by The Mercat Press in 1983, resulted from that Toronto meeting, as did her annotated The Hugh MacDiarmid-George Ogilvie Letters, published by Aberdeen University Press in 1988.