was there a scottish war literature? in ‘Disabled’ he gave a bitter twist to the sentiments of Housman’s ‘To an Athlete
DyingYoung’ in his description of a Scottish soldier: an amputee betrayed by the
allure of looking ‘a god in kilts’.^55
What this suggests is not that there wasn’t a Scottish literature in the First World
War, but rather that such a category had ceased to be an exclusive one. It was not
a matter of great consequence that Joseph Lee’s poetry took on an increasingly
Englishvoice,justasitmadelittledifferencewhetherapoetlikeAlanMackintosh
was Scottish by birth or by his own election. The fact that Mackintosh chose a
predominantly Scottish persona in his poetry was enough to show the continuing
vitality and relevance of aspects of that tradition. T. S. Eliot had been astute enough
to note that it might ‘be an evidence of strength, rather than of weakness, that the
Scots language and the Scottish literature did not maintain a separate existence’.
The Scottish poetry of the war was perhaps not always as strongly individual as it
might have been, but that may just bear out Eliot’s contention that by ‘throwing
in its luck with English’, Scottish literature ‘has not only much greater chance of
survival, but contributes important elements of strength to complete the English’.^56
(^55) Wilfred Owen, ‘Disabled’, inTheCompletePoemsandFragments,i:The Poems, ed. Jon Stallworthy
(London: Chatto & Windus, Hogarth Press, and Oxford University Press, 1983), 175. Owen, of course,
spent a significant part of his wartime service atCraiglockhart Hospital near Edinburgh, where he met
Siegfried Sassoon.
(^56) Eliot, ‘Was There a Scottish Literature?’, 681.