david goldie
War.^1 Eliot’scontention, that Scottish literature had evolved from an equivalent
status to its English counterpart to a point at which it could no longer claim even
provincial status within that literature, might seem a hard blow to Scottish cultural
nationalism—although it was an attitude that helped spark a literary revival centred
on Hugh MacDiarmid in the years that followed—but it is perhaps warranted by
the literary experience of the war years.^2 In looking at a broad range of the poetry
written and published in Scotland during the war, much of it written by unheralded
and subsequently neglected poets, this essay will attempt to prove and perhaps
qualify Eliot’s contention. In emphasizing the extent to which Scottish poetry was
subsumed in a generic British response to the war, the argument is not intended to
undermine the strong, self-conscious literary revival that followed; rather, it is to
explore the state of affairs that that revival sought to address.
The Poetry of Anglo-Scotland
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••Charles Hamilton Sorley has a good claim to be considered the best-known Scottish
poet of the First World War. But in claiming him for Scotland, critics have tended
to overlook quite how problematic this ascription of nationality actually is.^3 For,
though he was born in Aberdeen and spent his early childhood there, Sorley was
plainly formed in a milieu that might more properly be thought of as British.
The son of an eminent academic (himself educated at Birkenhead, Edinburgh,
Germany, and Cambridge), Sorley was schooled wholly in England and Germany
(King’s College Choir School, Marlborough College, and the University of Jena).
When war came, he deferred his scholarship to University College, Oxford, and
served in the Suffolk Regiment. His connection with Scotland, in other words,
was little more than one might expect from any well-travelled middle-class Briton
of the time. His pre-war poetry, too, fits more easily into a standard pattern
of early-century English public school verse than it does into any conceivable
Scottish model. The many literary references in his letters suggest a grounding
(^1) T. S. Eliot, ‘Was There a Scottish Literature?’,Athenaeum, 4657 (1919), 680–1. The book under
review was by G. Gregory Smith,Scottish Literature: Character and Influence(London: Macmillan,
1919).
(^2) For a useful collection of texts relating to thisrevival, see Margery Palmer McCulloch,Modernism
and Nationalism: Literature and Society in Scotland, 1918–1939: Source Documents for the Scottish
Renaissance(Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 2004). The key work of this revival
that shows the deepest influence of Eliot is Edwin Muir’sScott and Scotland: The Predicament of the
Scottish Writer(London: Routledge, 1936).
(^3) Sorley is, for example, included unproblematically in Trevor Royle (ed.),In Flanders Fields:
Scottish Poetry and Prose of the First World War(Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1990). The Scottish Arts
Council also assisted in the publication of Hilda D. Spear’s edition ofThe Poems and Selected Letters of
Charles Hamilton Sorley(Dundee: Blackness Press, 1978).