Abstract
The essay takes a new look at an old subject, the role of dictionaries in Hugh MacDiarmid’s so-called ‘early lyrics’. While demonstrating that the poet’s exploration of the lexicographical remains of Scots was more thorough-going and systematic than previous accounts have suggested, it positions his recourse to dictionaries in the intertextual habit that links the lyrics both to the English sonnets and prose sketches of the young Christopher Grieve and the encyclopaedic long poems to which MacDiarmid turned after abandoning Scots in the 1930s. The article attends in particular to the wide-angle allusiveness of Sangschaw and Penny Wheep, arguing that the poems in those volumes are most successful when they bring material drawn from the Scots lexicon into vital relationship with non-dictionary-drawn cultural artefacts of one sort or another. These include proverbs, myths, plays, novels, poems, nursery rhymes, ballads and hymns. The radically innovative reading of ‘The Watergaw’ at the climax of the essay interprets MacDiarmid’s inaugural Scots lyric as a verbally electric response to a famous Presbyterian hymn rather than a poem of autobiographical reflection.
Recommended Citation
Crotty, Patrick
(2024)
"Chitterin’ Lichts: Text and Intertext in Sangschaw and Penny Wheep,"
Studies in Scottish Literature:
Vol. 49:
Iss.
1, 51–88.
DOI: 10.51221/sc.ssl.2024.49.1.5
Available at:
https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/vol49/iss1/5