The Driving Force of the Scottish Renaissance
MACDIARMID, Hugh. A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons Limited. 1926.
8vo. Publisher’s dark blue boards, gilt vignette to upper board, spine and upper board lettered in gilt, in the publisher’s pale blue printed dust-jacket; pp. [viii], 108; jacket some-what faded with spine somewhat sunned and small loss to head of spine, corners and spine ends of boards lightly worn; some offsetting to endpapers, sporadic light spotting, p. 3 somewhat browned; a very good copy; half-title inscribed ‘Hugh MacDiarmid | (C. M. Grieve) | Montrose. | March | 1946’.
First edition, signed by the poet in his own name and his pen name, the culmina-tion of MacDiarmid’s use of ‘synthetic Scots’.
MacDiarmid (born Christopher Murray Grieve, 1892–1978) ‘almost single-handedly forged a Scottish Renaissance movement [...] MacDiarmid chose to write in Scots rather than Gaelic, but saw that it was necessary to improve the capabilities of the language by reviving old Scots words and borrowing freely from Gaelic and other sources. Thus he created a synthetic Scots, later sometimes known as “Lallans”’ (National Library of Scotland, online). This ‘synthetic Scots’ is exemplified here, this edition providing a twelve-page glossary of Scots terminology used in the text.
This copy was signed in Montrose in 1946; MacDiarmid had moved to the coastal town in 1919, where he worked for a time as editor and reporter for the Montrose Review, and it was there that he wrote the present work, as well as his first book, Annals of the Five Senses, as well as Sangschaw and Penny Wheep.
SKU: 2124860