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Despite their shared commitment to a poetry of ideas, to republican socialism and to Scottish nationalism, Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Morgan disagreed significantly on how these values related to avant-garde writing from America and Europe and, more broadly, on how Scottish writers should respond to cultural and social changes that were international in impact. In early 1960s Scotland, an ostensible literary quarrel on the uses of Scots language revealed deeper tensions of rural and urban perspectives, of generational difference in moral attitudes, and of artistic responsiveness to non-standard city dialects and contemporary working-class life.
Keywords: language, identity, social class, experimental writing, internationalism.
Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978) and Edwin Morgan (1920-2010) command attention as the most significant Scottish poets respectively of the first and second halves of the twentieth century. Each is admired in terms of thematic range, variety of form, intellectual toughness in pursuit of his own artistic path, and marked influence on younger poets coming to terms with such a powerful precursor. Both were radical socialists, although Morgan's modest demeanour tended to disguise the extent of his commitment. But both differed radically in their attitude to the kind of Scots language that could best express and creatively explore the concerns of Scotland in the modem world, and its relation to that world. Theirs was a struggle for direction in both its main senses. For MacDiarmid, probably uppermost was a determination to control the cultural advance he felt himself to have achieved for Scotland; Morgan's main interest was in new directions of travel, whether in time, space or poetic form.
Perhaps it is not all that surprising that they would come into conflict with each other, given their differences of age, personality, social background and academic training, and indeed of their approach to poetic experiment and the avant-garde. This chapter will describe the most public definition of their differences, at the Edinburgh International Festival in 1962, when they shared a platform in the McEwan Hall during a five-day Writers' Conference (20-24 August) on The Novel Today} The topic for discussion was 'Scottish Writing Today', and the substantial Conference Programme & Notes (Price five shillings) already contained brief contextualising essays for an international audience and contributing authors from Europe, Asia and America. In the Programme entries...