Caledonian Antisyzygy

Responding to the view held by various literary figures that Scottish literature lacked value due to an absence of coherence, G. Gregory Smith proposed the idea that Scotland’s diversity and polarity were precisely what formed the essence of Scottish literature. Building upon this idea, which Smith coined ‘Caledonian antisyzygy’, Christopher Murray Grieve headed the Scottish Literary Renaissance under the name Hugh MacDiarmid and incorporated it in the revival of Scottish art, culture, and language. Vital to expressing this idea was the utilisation of the Scots language, which culminated in MacDiarmid’s epic monologue poem, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. MacDiarmid’s incorporation of Caledonian antisyzygy into his modernist poetic form created a model for younger poets to explore and question notions of Scottish identity and literature. The influence of MacDiarmid’s exploration of language, particularly Scots, can be traced in the works of Edwin Morgan, who used shifting forms of genres, speakers, and settings, to explore the contradictory nature of Scotland. Tom Leonard similarly followed MacDiarmid in the use of Scots, however, his particular focus on the Glaswegian vernacular allows for a more particular inspection on working-class phonetics than MacDiarmid’s synthetic Scots, though both defy linguistic conformity. Ultimately, the three Scottish poets vary in their approach to poetic style, but are united in their use of Scots to explore notions of Smith’s Caledonian antisyzygy, and illustrate contradiction not as a weakness, but as a form of poetic identity and expression.

As Scots began to fall out of poetic fashion, dismissed as a relic of the Burnsian Scottish past, MacDiarmid revived the language through a particular form of synthetic Scots – using dictionaries to combine various regional dialects into a singular language of poetic power. The poet revolutionised language as a linguistic tool; his modernist approach to Scots through the synthetic construction forced readers and poets to engage with the language beyond its rustic, pastoral boundaries, associations which ensured that for years, the language ‘had come to be associated all too exclusively with backward-looking nostalgia and sentimentality’ (McClure 15). Through MacDiarmid, Scots became a language of philosophical and intellectual depth, capable of exploring serious discourse. This culminated in A Drunk Man, in which MacDiarmid’s constructed linguistic reclamation becomes a metaphor for the current condition of Scottish culture. The poet embraces the instability of language and Scottish national identity, combining the local and the artificial to mirror the fractured nature of Scottish interiority. MacDiarmid mixes everyday humour with philosophical meditations. His equal attention to the musings of Nietzsche as to the drunk man’s friendships and drunken ventures, captures the dual ability of Scotland to embrace both the global and the local. As the narrator ponders over Nietzschean ideas – ‘let the lesson be – to be yersel’s, / Ye needna fash gin it’s to be ocht else’ – MacDiarmid illustrates the ability of Scots to poignantly explore moments of tenderness and philosophy (lines 743-4). This patchwork of intellectualism and grotesque humour is a deliberate embodiment of Caledonian antisyzygy; the fragmentation of voice and tone expose the oppositeness of Scotland’s identity. Scots is simultaneously a local, colloquial language to express “low” forms of humour, and one capable of grand, intellectual refection. MacDiarmid’s synthetic Scots resists categorisation: through its embrace of various modes of expression, it illustrates the power that can be found in the duality of the Scots language.

Tom Leonard similarly utilises this dual ability of the Scots language to explore national issues, however, his focus on the Glaswegian vernacular distinguishes him from the synthetic Scots of MacDiarmid. Leonard’s specific focus on the phonetic Glaswegian voice, unlike MacDiarmid’s blend of various forms of Scots, provides a greater poetic exploration of the working-class experience and speech patterns. Theresa Munoz comments that Leonard’s urban poetry, ‘like Edwin Morgan, challenged the prescriptive limits of Hugh MacDiarmid’s synthetic and generic brand of Scots, Lallans. This counter reaction towards Lallans was made … in urban phonetic dialect, representing the marginalised voices of the Glaswegian working-classes’ (2). Language for Leonard becomes a form of identity, and is a directly political act to convey real issues. His poem, ‘The Good Thief’ explores religious tension not through an artificial merging of various dialects, but through an authentic dialogue, specific to the Glaswegian working class. The voice of the speaker is recognisably working-class – Leonard repeats the phrase ‘heh jimmy’ throughout the poem which is playfully humorous in its Glaswegian stereotype of the drunken, rambling philosopher (lines 1, 5, 11). Yet, the poem demands to be taken seriously; Jimmy never answers, and underneath the conversation lies a sense of desperation and anxiety. The speaker continues to repeat himself, questioning, ‘ma right insane yirra pape / ma right insane yirwanny us jimmy’ (6-7). The anxiety of the speaker unravels as he grapples with the undertones of the one-way conversation: the possibility of social exclusion through difference in religious identity. Leonard invokes the sectarian violence in Glaswegian football through the mention of ‘thi gemm’, which the speaker wishes to watch with his religiously-aligned companion (12). Through this mix of the comedic with the serious, Leonard forces the reader to reassess accent associations. Comfort is disrupted as the poem progresses, and the gradual emotional depth of the narrator makes it harder to dismiss him. The poet challenges the idea that serious poetry exists only through the English language by undermining conventional linguistic authority. The vernacular becomes not a caricature, but an integral part of the exploration of Glaswegian sectarianism in Leonard’s poem. The urban voice holds both extremes of humour and seriousness, exposing the poetic power of duality in tackling social, political, and religious concerns.

Edwin Morgan’s use of linguistic experimentation and sound poetry is a vital in exploring the contradictions and duality within Scottish literature. His 1968 poem, ‘Canedolia’, is a playful and overwhelming rhythmic poem that lists both real and fake Scottish place names as the voice responds to questions about the nation’s geographical locations. Morgan builds upon MacDiarmid’s linguistic constructions and inventions, however, he experiments further through his entanglement of the real and the imaginary. He creates a map of Scotland that is both authentically local, and surreally imaginative. Morgan utilises the absurdity of Scottish place names – ‘from largo to lunga from joppa to skibo’ – and quickens the pace of the poem to confuse the reader into a state of uncertainty (line 8). The questions create an absurdist tone as the speaker personifies the locations: ‘who saw? / rhu saw rum. garve saw smoo. nigg saw tain’ (2-3). Morgan does not explain the places, nor the Scots words he uses – ‘it’s freuchie, it’s faifley’ – letting the sound resonate instead (13). This overwhelming map of Scotland becomes simultaneously known and unknown, able to be understood not through context and descriptive poetic language, but through the sound and images they produce. Morgan experiments similarly in ‘The Loch Ness Monster’s Song’. Just as Tom Leonard challenged the dominance of ‘standard’ poetic language, Morgan strips his poem of any recognisable words until it appears to be a mesh of nonsense. Beginning with ‘Sssnnnwhuffffll?’ the poet continues until the song fades into a slow repetition – ‘blm plm, / blm plm, / blm plm, / blm plm, / blp’ (lines 1, 11-4). The poem is both recognisably Scottish through the image and voice of the monster, yet also mysterious and unconventional as it completely rejects the English or Scots language. Morgan’s use of real and imagined words in the two sound poems ground them in antisyzygy; Scotland becomes both real and unreal, grounded and fragmented. By destabilising ideas of unified language and national identity, and focusing on regional and surreal voices, Morgan illustrates the competing voices that exist within Scotland, attempting not to resolve them but to illustrate how they can work productively.

Morgan and MacDiarmid similarly create symbols of Scotland and its fragmentation within their works through powerful displays of poetic imagery. ‘Canedolia’ presents a living image of Scotland, zooming in and out from the Highlands and Lowlands, the rural and urban, and the real and surreal. The nation becomes united through its duality, and Morgan celebrates these differences for the vibrance and diversity they bring to Scotland. This visual tapestry culminates in Morgan’s final toast, ‘schiehallion! schiehallion! schiehallion!’, echoing T.S. Eliot’s Hindu scripture in ‘The Wasteland’, though Morgan’s toast invokes the Scottish landscape as the celebratory symbol (line 38). The poet elevates the Scottish landscape into the sacred – turning the local into the reverential. Similarly, MacDiarmid paints an image of the nation through the thistle, symbolising the soul of Scotland. MacDiarmid’s thistle is a complex, modernist image, bearing the symbolic weight of a decaying culture in crisis. However, the poet moves beyond the despair typical of modernist imagery, and embraces contradiction and division. The drunk man sees himself within the thistle: ‘The munelicht’s like a lookin’-glass, / The thistle’s like mysel’’ (221-2). MacDiarmid’s speaker is forced to confront his own contradictions as he looks upon the thistle, seeing a reflection that is not fixed, but fluid and changeable. Margery Palmer McCulloch notes that ‘A Drunk Man is notable for its protagonist’s overt struggle towards the realization of the potential within him, unlike Eliot’s Wastelanders who fear to be awakened from their death-in-life existence’ (490). The thistle is a projection of the speaker’s interiority, and by extension, the nation itself. The poet expands upon modernist self-consciousness as he allows room for renewal and resilience instead of wallowing in conflict and despair. Through national symbolism, MacDiarmid and Morgan consider the complexities that exist within Scotland, and embrace them as a source of poetic dynamism and strength. The imagery rooted in landscape and localism exposes the fragmentation inherent within Scotland, which is portrayed as a powerful part of the nation, and something to be explored and celebrated within its literature.

A masculine narrative voice is used to explore ideas of contradictions in the poetry of Leonard and MacDiarmid. Leonard’s often aggressive male voice provides a more confident and violent perspective on issues that strays from conventional poetic approaches to serious topics. Munoz notes this as ‘new Scottish realism’, which ‘conveyed the experience of urban living in the West of Scotland and explored attitudes towards masculinity, violence and religion’ (3). The voice in Leonard’s poem ‘Moral Philosophy’ is frustrated and increasingly impatient as he stumbles over his words and attempts to recover his train of thought – ‘h hawd oan / whair wuzza / naw’ (lines 5-7). The sense of being trapped by an inability to articulate himself creates a desperate assertiveness: ‘lissn / noo lissnty mi toknty yi / right’ (2-4). This overcompensation from the working-class voice stems from a lack of confidence within a world that marginalises men of his class, who are viewed as uneducated due to their vernacular speech. Leonard provides a vivid image of the rage this oppression induces from the Glaswegian man, whose inarticulation is an insecurity to rally against with aggression. MacDiarmid’s drunken speaker similarly stumbles and rambles in his ‘dreidfu’ state’ (447). Whilst he has the ability to ponder over philosophical musings, his narrative voice is often undercut by a sense of irony and doubt, often causing him to get ‘fair waun’ert’ concerning issues he appears to hold strong opinions on (93). The poets provide a masculine voice that holds a contradictory tension; both are confident and authoritative, yet often incoherent in their attempt to voice their struggle. This translates into an insecurity embedded within the Scottish consciousness. These flawed, fragmented voices mirror the fragmented nature of Scottish identity; they are weighed down by cultural contradiction, and react against the tension that derives from societal marginalisation and cultural decay within the nation.

Leonard also analyses notions of Scottish disenfranchisement through accent bias. His aggressive narration continues in ‘The Six O’Clock News’, the third instalment from ‘Unrelated Incidents’, in which the narrative voice ‘angrily reacts against cultural snobbery’ (Carruthers 67). The narrator claims he speaks ‘wia BBC accent’ in a mocking subversion of credibility concerning voice and truth (lines 6-7). Leonard critiques assumptions that truth can only be spoken in a ‘correct’ and ‘proper’ voice – ‘yi / widny wahnt / mi ti talk / aboot thi / trooth wia / voice lik / wanna yoo / scruff’ (8-15). This ironic mimicking of the BBC voice serves as a powerful linguistic protest against language prejudice, forcing the reader to face their own language biases manufactured by the media. Leonard destabilises truth through the confidence of the narrator despite the ironic situation; he states, ‘yooz doant no / thi trooth yirsellz cawz / yi canny talk / right’ (32-5). Through this, the poet exposes the view that working-class Scottish voices are deemed unintelligent and untrustworthy due to their ‘improper’ vernacular. The final assertion of the narrator, ‘this is / the six a clock /nyooz. Belt up’, is a direct demand from the narrative voice to reject negative linguistic associations and biases (35-7). Leonard creates a contradiction in his poem: the speaker is simultaneously the trustworthy BBC news reporter, and the untrustworthy ‘scruff’ (15). Instead of resolving the duality, he satirises the situation to expose its absurdity. The Glaswegian vernacular is provided the power and agency to destabilise linguistic hierarchies, exposing the arbitrary nature of voice in the ability to express truths.

Morgan provides a complex interpretation of linguistic differences in his 1973 poem, ‘The First Men on Mercury’. Patrick Crotty describes Morgan as ‘a poet of immediacies, concerned with the way life happens to happen anywhere "from Glasgow to Saturn"’ (90). The poem’s dialogue between the exploring Earthmen and the aliens on Mercury provides a surreal, science-fictional interpretation of linguistic misunderstandings and the limits of language within the setting of space. Just as the Scots language has been othered and misunderstood throughout the years, so too are the Mercurians, whose language is satirised to initially sound absurd by Morgan – ‘Bawr stretter! Bawr. Bawr. Stretterhawl?’ (3). The Earthmen attempt to communicate by projecting their own linguistic framework upon the aliens: ‘You are here and we are there and we / are now here with you, is this clear?’ (6-7). This echoes the arrival of the coloniser, imposing its own language system over the Other. Through this struggle, Morgan mirrors the conflict within Scottish identity: the tension that derives from the remaining affiliation with Scottish culture and the Scots language, and the influence of English-speaking norms that have been standardised within the nation. However, where Scots fell to the dominance of the English language, Morgan provides the Mercurians with the agency to banish the Earthmen and maintain control over their land and language. They utilise their new knowledge of the English language to order the explorers to leave: ‘You must go back to your planet. / Go back in peace’ (36-7). Morgan imagines a world in which encounters can be made with other cultures, but language colonisation is prevented by providing agency and control to the marginalised. He reflects the Scottish experience within the British Empire; both an integral part of the colonisation process against foreign lands and peoples, but also a victim of cultural marginalisation through the suppression of Scots in favour of the English language. As the Mercurians reject the Earthmen’s attempt to communicate, Morgan illustrates the possibility that Scots holds in its emerging revival. By asserting control and taking power back from the dominance of the English language, ‘The First Men on Mercury’ reverses language hierarchies that have worked to suppress languages like Scots in the past. The Mercurians, whilst inhabiting the role of the colonised, actively decolonise themselves. Like the Scots language, they hold a position of antisyzygy –victim to past linguistic suppression, but a resilient and powerful form of resistance against English language dominance.

This resistance to the decay of Scottish culture is echoed in the narrator’s national self-consciousness in MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man. There is a sense of cultural pride, but also an awareness of cultural dilution as Scots move away or disassociate from national traditions. MacDiarmid mocks the ‘Croose London Scotties wi’ their braw shirt fronts’ for their cosmopolitan views and lifestyle, having left the nation and therefore abandoned their Scottishness (line 45). The narrator additionally ponders over the failing state of Burns clubs, in which he jokingly bets ‘ten to wan the piper is a Cockney’ (40). These observations present a simultaneous sense of national pride, and a shame that stems from the nation allowing itself to fall into cultural dilution and decay. MacDiarmid commended younger Scottish writers for their ‘knowledge of popular types, local dialects, slang, and a profound love of the streets and all sorts and conditions of people’, which aided in the reclamation of national identity (107). Using such local dialects and slang, Leonard subverts the shame surrounding Scottish language and culture through his assertive indictment against internalised accent biases in ‘The Six O’Clock News’. MacDiarmid ponders over cultural dilution through meditations on national identity and linguistics; Leonard’s poem does not question the ability of Scotland to recover its cultural richness, but acts upon it by aggressively reclaiming linguistic legitimacy and ‘trooth’ without hesitation (33). Where MacDiarmid employs a vision of reclamation, Leonard enacts his unapologetic resistance. Both poets identify dual notions of national pride and shame, utilising the Scots language and Glaswegian vernacular to confront their fear of cultural dilution. As such, Scottish identity becomes once more fractured and contradictory, struggling to reconcile a sense of national pride lost due to years of internalised linguistic shame and cultural apathy.

The three poets are vital in the understanding of the contradictory nature of Scotland and its literature. They expertly utilise the Scots language to explore notions of Caledonian antisyzygy and challenge standard linguistic conventions within poetry. MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man is a foundational text in modernist Scots poetry, which forged the path for Morgan and Leonard’s language poetry to discuss and build upon similar ideas in new and inventive ways. Whether constructing an artificial, synthetic form of Scots, or speaking in a specific local dialect, the poets explore Scottish duality through language, voice, pace, and imagery, to embrace Smith’s idea of contradiction as a vital element of Scottish identity and literature.

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Works cited

Carruthers, Gerard. Scottish Literature. Edinburgh University Press, 2009.

Crotty, Patrick. “That Caledonian Antisyzygy.” The Poetry Ireland Review, no. 63, 1999, pp. 89–93, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25579503.

Leonard, Tom. Outside the Narrative: Poems, 1965-2009. Etruscan Books, 2011.

---. “from Unrelated Incidents.” pp.77-82.

---. “Moral Philosophy.” p.51.

---. “The Good Thief.” p.14.

MacDiarmid, Hugh. A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. Polygon, 2008.

MacDiarmid, Hugh. “The Scottish Renaissance: The Next Step.” Selected Essays of Hugh MacDiarmid, edited by Duncan Glen, University of California Press, 2023, pp.105-10.

McClure, J. Derrick. “Poetry in Scots Since the Twentieth-Century Renaissance.” Scottish Language, vol. 37, 2018, pp. 13-19, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A587261386/LitRC?u=ed_itw&sid=summon&xid=20724a68.

McCulloch, Margery Palmer. “Hugh MacDiarmid.” A Companion to Modernist Poetry, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2014, pp. 484–93.

Morgan, Edwin. Collected Poems. Carcanet Press, 1996.

---. “Canedolia an off-concrete Scotch fantasia.” pp.156-7.

---. “The First Men on Mercury.” pp.267-8.

---. “The Loch Ness Monster’s Song.” pp.248.

Munoz, Theresa. “Poetic Forms & Existentialism in Tom Leonard’s Access to the Silence: Poems and Posters, 1984–2004.” Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, vol. 9, no. 1, 2017, pp.1-31 https://doi.org/10.16995/biip.34.