Studies in Scottish Literature Volume 13 | Issue 1 Article 19 1978 Scottish Poetry 1974-1976 Alexander Scott Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Scott, Alexander (1978) "Scottish Poetry 1974-1976," Studies in Scottish Literature: Vol. 13: Iss. 1. Available at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/vol13/iss1/19 This Article is brought to you by the Scottish Literature Collections at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Studies in Scottish Literature by an authorized editor of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Alexander Scott Scottish Poetry 1974-1976 For poetry in English, the major event of the period, in 1974, was the publication by Secker and Warburg, London, of the Com plete Poems of Andrew Young (1885-1971), arranged and intro duced by Leonard Clark. Although Young had lived in England since the end of the First World War, and had so identified himself with that country as to exchange his Presbyterian min istry for the Anglican priesthood in 1939, his links with Scotland where he was born (in Elgin) and educated (in Edin burg) were never broken, and he retained "the habit of mind that created Scottish philosophy, obsessed with problems of perception, with interaction between the 'I' and the 'Thou' and the 'I' and the 'It,."l Often, too, that "it" was derived from his loving observation of the Scottish landscape, to which he never tired of returning. Scarcely aware of any of this, Mr. Clark's introduction places Young in the English (or Anglo-American) tradition, in "the field company of John Clare, Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas and Edmund Blunden ••• Tennyson and Browning may have been greater influences." Such a comment overlooks one of the most distinctive qualities of Young's nature poetry, the metaphysical wit that has affinities with those seven teenth-century poets whose cast of mind was inevitably moulded by their religion.