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A Study of Hugh MacDiarmid’s In Memoriam James Joyce James Benstead PhD in English Literature University of Edinburgh 2019 Declaration I declare that this thesis has been composed solely by myself and that it has not been submitted, in whole or in part, in any previous application for a degree. Except where stated otherwise by reference or acknowledgment, the work presented is entirely my own. James Benstead 28 June 2019 Abstract This thesis is a study of the ways in which Hugh MacDiarmid’s long poem In Memo- riam James Joyce incorporates material from various source texts. It argues that In Memoriam’s use of citation is a response to the changing status of English as a global language in the first half of the twentieth century, and that understanding the text in this way facilitates new, holistic understandings of MacDiarmid’s poetic career. Critics have largely focused on MacDiarmid’s earlier work, such as the Scots lyrics and A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, at the expense of engaging with later work such as In Memoriam. This approach has meant, moreover, that critics have struggled to develop a coherent understanding of MacDiarmid’s overall poetic output. The critical framework developed in this thesis understands In Memoriam to be a development of — rather than a divergence from —MacDiarmid’s earlier work. Through a close reading of In Memoriam that is enabled by a new knowledge of its source materials, this framework demonstrates how the text first foregrounds its own use of citation and then goes on to use citation to develop a series of ideas related to media culture, linguistic history, and its perception of cultural hegemony. Through its analysis of In Memoriam, this thesis contends that throughout his career MacDiarmid should be thought of primarily as a poet who made use of citation in order to expose and challenge the power relations that are implicit in the various linguistic hierarchies that he interrogated. Contents Introduction .......................................9 Chapter One .....................................25 Chapter Two .....................................75 Chapter Three ....................................107 Chapter Four .....................................131 Chapter Five ......................................173 Chapter Six ......................................205 Conclusion .......................................241 Works Cited .....................................251 Appendix ........................................271 Introduction In this thesis I am concerned almost exclusively with In Memoriam James Joyce, which I consider to be the fullest development of MacDiarmid’s “later” or “mature” work. I divide MacDiarmid’s other poetic output into two further periods. The first of these is the early work in Scots: Sangschaw (1925), Penny Wheep (1926), A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), and The Lucky Bag (1927), and other poems written during this period but not collected until later. I consider To Circumjack Cencrastus (1930), First Hymn to Lenin and Other Poems (1931), Second Hymn to Lenin (1932), and Scots Un- bound and Other Poems (1932) to make up a transitionary middle period, during which MacDiarmid wrote in a Scots that was progressively less dense and introduced more Gaelic themes and language into his work. The “later” or “mature” period begins with Stony Limits and Other Poems (1934) and is exemplified by the increased use of English — including a “synthetic English” incorporating scientific or technical vocabularies — and the adoption of a distinctive prose-poem style with minimal regular rhythm or rhyme scheme, and often composed through the citation of pre-existing source material taken from the work of other writers. The emergence of this later style continues through various poems and collections MacDiarmid published in the 1930s and early 1940s, with the later style dominating MacDiarmid’s output from the 1943 publication of Lucky Poet onwards and — judging by the Complete Poems — making up around half of MacDiarmid’s total poetic output.1 With some notable exceptions, critics have focused on MacDiarmid’s earlier 1. MacDiarmid’s publication history from the 1930s onwards is complicated; much of the material that would appear in Lucky Poet, In Memoriam James Joyce, The Kind of Poetry I Want, and other later volumes seems originally to have been compiled in the 1930s and early 1940s when MacDiarmid was living on Whalsay. This is discussed further in Chapter 2. 9 work at the expense of engaging with his later work. As I demonstrate in the literature review I undertake in Chapter One, this focus is in part a consequence of the historical development of MacDiarmid studies, which came to valorise certain critical approaches. This valorisation came to define, in turn, much of the initial critical reception of In Memoriam. For example, writing in 1945 R. Crombie Saunders de- scribes the “three most valuable attributes” of MacDiarmid’s “Scots poems” as “their emotional power”, “the detachment which gives them their universality”, and “the perfection of their form and language”, before going on to characterise MacDiarmid’s later work as “verbose and inchoate” (“Thistle” 153-154). Kenneth Buthlay has argued that in his early work, MacDiarmid’s “cosmological eye was brought into sharper focus through his use of Scots words”, and that this resulted in MacDiarmid’s “own brand of Imagism” (Hugh 1982 28-9). Buthlay has also described the English language poem “Perfect”, which MacDiarmid first published in The Islands of Scotland in 1939, as “the poem that Ezra Pound and the Imagists talked about but did not write, in which ‘the proper and perfect symbol is the natural object’ itself” (Hugh 1964 89). And Roderick Watson has built on Buthlay’s understanding of the Scots lyrics, arguing that they “meet the various Imagist ‘rules’ with considerable success” (MacDiarmid 1985 23). While this conceptualisation of MacDiarmid’s work is often productive and illuminating, it becomes less useful in proportion to the extent that MacDiarmid moves away from techniques that can be seen to draw on the work of the Imagists. Moreover, while more recent work by critics such as Laura O’Connor and Matthew Hart has moved beyond these critical paradigms, their work has retained a focus on MacDiarmid’s earlier output. The work MacDiarmid produced from To Circumjack Cencrastus onwards remains relatively unexplored. As Alan Riach has noted, criticism of Cencrastus “regis- ters the poem’s failure as an organic unity but does not adequately suggest the im- plications of this for the poetry which follows from it”: i.e., MacDiarmid’s middle and later period work, including In Memoriam James Joyce (Epic 41). For Riach, addressing 10 this problem would require a critic “to relinquish the critical idea of an organically unified poem” and “to admit to the failure of one kind of critical procedure” (Epic 41). In other words, while certain approaches can facilitate a rich understanding of MacDiarmid’s earlier work, the understanding of the later work may be predicated — following Riach — on abandoning those approaches. But how should we decide what approaches are to replace them? If the failure of the existing approaches to produce a coherent understanding of MacDiarmid’s overall output is a consequence of the way in which those approaches were developed in response to the earlier work then it may be beneficial to develop new approaches in direct response to the later work. Ideally, these new approaches could then be usefully applied to the earlier work, thereby avoiding a repetition of the way in which many of the existing critical approaches fail to account for MacDiarmid’s later work. But which of the later texts should be the focus, and which of its (or their) formal or thematic properties should guide the development of the approach that is used to read it? One answer is suggested by a debate that took place in the letters pages of the Times Literary Supplement in 1965, which saw various correspondents claim that MacDiarmid had appropriated their work, or the work of another writer. The debate began when the poet Glyn Jones wrote to the TLS, claiming to have written all but the first line of the poem “Perfect”, which MacDiarmid had included in the 1939 volume The Islands of Scotland and which George Sutherland Fraser had quoted in full in his 31 December 1964 TLS review of Duncan Glen’s Hugh MacDi- armid and the Scottish Renaissance, and the first edition of Kenneth Buthlay’s Hugh MacDiarmid. MacDiarmid responded to the issue himself, initially apologising to Jones while also implying that his “plagiarism” of Jones’s work was accidental. However, as more correspondents documented incidents where MacDiarmid appeared to have appropriated the work of other writers, MacDiarmid changed his position, glossing over the allegations, characterising copyright as “a legal matter and not a literary one”, and eventually (mis)quoting T. S. Eliot’s claim in The Sacred Wood that “[i]mmature 11 poets imitate; mature poets steal” (114). The first suggestion that this aspect of MacDiarmid’s work may have been deliberate and systematic was made by the poet and reviewer Hugh Gordon Porteus, who observed that “Mr Glyn Jones is not the only writer to have the honour of seeing his prose … magically transmuted into the splendid poetry of Mr.