Hugh MacDiarmid’s Poetics of Commitment: the modern stigmata of bereavement

Résumé En

Modernity is inhabited by the lingering absence of reality. In the 1930s, this persistent void engulfed the work of the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, leader of the Scottish Renaissance Movement. This collapsed reality surfaces in his poems addressed to absentee figures where the ‘Death of God’ worsens his plight. The world has become, in Edwin Muir’s words, an “absence that receives us” (‘The Absent’, 1949). To fill in this empty seat, MacDiarmid, like many others at the time, finds refuge in communism and nationalism. His political idealism comes into being in the poetic association of reality and ideal, symbolised by Jean and Sophia, the characters of A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), and duplicates later in the fantasised image of Lenin, perfect blending of idea and action. MacDiarmid’s idealism embodies the desire for a form of sur-reality. Prompted by this unquenchable desire, MacDiarmid’s poetry forces the power of the ideal to become solid. Ceaselessly, necrophilic tragicomedies are performed in poems that value life and violate death, spurning the shadows of threatening impotence. Rejecting Sartre’s denial of the political authority of poetry, the violence of MacDiarmid’s work desperately attempts to have reality submit to its aura. Its shrill imperative and nominal forms borrow their power of persuasion from advertisement slogans while its poetic margins endeavour to mimic performative oracles. The political and poetical ideal opens the doors of a reality that can only be conquered when holding idealism close. In Hugh MacDiarmid’s political commitment, one can recognise the marks of a modern mind which has to mourn over the guiding principle of reality as the sur-reality, or idealised reality, he created, was far too high for language, too high for a world born out of shrapnel seeds.