Collected Poems

The Scottish Library

by Sydney Goodsir Smith

The premature death of Sydney Goodsir Smith at the age of fifty-nine, while this volume of his Collected Poems was in production, deprived the world of one of the major personalities in twentieth-century British literature. The poems included in this volume, mostly written in Scots dialect - from Skail Wind, first published in 1941, to the moving poems of his maturity and the gentle, philosophical poems of his later years - show us the journey of a man who understood the world only too well.

287 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1975

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.