‘Scottish Eccentrics’: Hugh MacDiarmid and the Scottish Isles

International audienceHugh MacDiarmid is probably the poet who did the most to defend Scotland’s difference in the 20th century. Born in the Borders, he was acutely aware of the need to distinguish Scottish culture, language and tradition from her southern neighbour’s. Even if MacDiarmid is well known for his use of Scots in the 1920s, his English prose and poetic works in the 1930s were also aimed at asserting the distinctiveness of Scotland vis-à-vis England, especially when the poet chose the Scottish Isles as a subject-matter. Analysing the book-length essay The Islands of Scotland (1939) and the island poems written in the Thirties, this paper will examine the paradoxical strategies used by MacDiarmid to reinforce both regional and national specificities, and will show as well that his definition of Scotland was based on diversity and difference. This paper will also address the fruitful correspondence between the poet’s own difference, the isles’ and islander’s difference and Scotland’s difference. When he lived on Whalsay, between 1933 and 1942, the poet was an outsider amongst a community of outsiders, within an outsider nation. And this fractal configuration mirrors MacDiarmid’s conception of difference: in his work, difference is always designed through multiple frames; one difference always accommodates another one