Patrick Moran

On a New Year’s Eve gathering, after I had finished editing an anthology of contemporary Scottish Poetry, a learned friend admitted to me that he did not know a single Scottish poem. I pointed out that in fact he did know a very famous Scottish poem, and at midnight we would all (thanks to a generous amount of spirits) garble our way through Robert Burn’s poem composed in the year 1788. At that particular time, as the Northern appendage of the British Empire, the country of Scotland was experiencing its share of significant political, social, and cultural shifts. To begin with, the madness of King George III was a destabilizing force in the already stressed relations between Scotland, Ireland, and England; on the other hand, the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, established in London, was quickly moving to the north among the Calvinist and Presbyterian communities, and only one year earlier, Scotland would be brutally introduced to its first working class martyrs of the Carlton Weaver’s Strike. Also, it should be noted that during the same period, Scotland and England would experience the violent and disturbing impact of the Gordon Riots, the Protestant-led uprisings immortalized in Charles Dickens’s fifth novel, Barnaby Rudge (1841).¹

It is no surprise that literature seeks to preserve, understand, and enhance the cultural changes that occur in any particular country, but unlike journalism or the immediacy of blogging or online media, poetry and prose seem to require, for the lack of a better description, an incubation period for the ideas to be processed, filtered, and clarified. As the editor of Forty Voices Strong: An Anthology of Contemporary Scottish Poetry, this was especially true given the cross-section of poetry written and published from approximately 2015–2017 in various Scottish publications, including North Words Now and Gutter: The Magazine of New Scottish Writing.² As a country, Scotland had recently experienced a narrow but unsuccessful bid for independence from England in 2014, coupled with the economic and political changes of the 2016 Brexit referendum (Scotland and Northern Ireland overwhelming voted to remain members of the European Union). As an American reader of Scottish poetry, it struck me as a watershed moment to try and introduce US readers to a community of poets who were processing a significant period in Scotland’s literary and cultural history. 

A country’s desire to preserve its political, social, or cultural identity is not unique; however, when that act of preservation occurs in a dialect of English or another language, it is a more rarified form. The Afrikaner language (a combination of Dutch and South African) or the Landsmaal Movement (a Dano-Norwegian language known as Nynorsk) in Norway are two examples of linguistic conservancy that are still recognized and maintained for cultural and social purposes. In Scotland, the Scots language or the Scots dialect has a significant literary history. Much of the charm of Robert Burns’s book of poems, Poems: Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, is derived from his use of the Scottish dialect. In his poem, “To a Mouse,” the dialect hovers between the English and the phonetic spelling of the Scottish pronunciation.

Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie,O, what a pannic’s in thy breastie!Thou need na start awa sae hasty,Wi’ bickering brattle!I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee,Wi’ murd’ring pattle!³

This startlingly original and contemplative portrait of a destroyed mouse nest and its contents begins to demonstrate the scope of Burns’s compassion and attention to detail, but it is also a compelling example of diglossia, “the linguistic situation in which two dialects or languages are used by a single language community.” “Charm” might not be the most precise word, but when Burns’s book was reviewed by Henry Mackenzie he described him (Burns) as having the “sagacity of a Heaven-born ploughman.”⁴ Part of Mackenzie’s description is, however, reflected inBurns’s use of the dialect, which was an assertion of the Scottish identity and a persona Burns was eager to capitalize on for the sake of his career as a poet, which considering his popularity and influence was very significant. 

In 1790, at the height of his popularity, Burns wrote the 224-line poem that, according to the Scottish writer John Gibson Lockhart, was written in a single day. Burns wrote it for Francis Grose, who had asked for a few lines to accompany the illustration of Alloway Kirk, intended for volume two of his book The Antiquities of Scotland. Captain Robert Riddell, a friend of Burns, introduced Burns to Grose, and during a conversation the poet asked the antiquarian to include a drawing of Alloway Kirk when he came to Ayrshire. Grose agreed, as long as Burns would give him something to print with it. Burns remembered the Ayrshire tale from his boyhood, and he wrote to Grose in June 1790 outlining three witch stories associated with Alloway Kirk.⁵ The second of the stories was “Tam o’ Shanter.” The poem first appeared in the Edinburgh Magazine for March 1791, a month before it appeared in the second volume of Francis Grose’s Antiquities of Scotland.⁶

When chapman billies leave the street,

And drouthy neebors neebors meet,

market-days are wearing late,

And folk begin to tak the gate;

While we sit bousin, at the nappy,

And gettin fou and unco happy,

We think na on the lang Scots miles,

The mosses, waters, slaps, and stiles,

That lie between us and our hame,

Whare sits our sulky, sullen dame,

Gathering her brows like gathering storm,

Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.⁷

While “Tam O’Shanter” does not employ the same amount of Scots language as the previous example, the tonal qualities of the poem evoke the identity of the Scottish people and the landscape.⁸ In the first twelve lines of the poem, Burns introduces to the reader the relaxed social setting of the poem, the individuals who populate it, the general imbibing of spirits, the expansive rural imagery of the Scottish landscape, and finally Tam’s wife’s marital temperament. Even if the poem did not appear in the Scots language, these impressions would be a testament to Burns’s astonishing poetic talents, but in the Scots language the reader experiences the rustic qualities of the poem and a genuine tonal impact of the diglossic use of the language. In Michael Schmidt’s short essay, “Humble Truth,” he quotes the poet Edward Thomas summation of Burns’s unique talents, “It is as near to the music as nonsense could be, and yet it is perfect sense.” Schmidt goes on to say, “Burns’s poetry is a relief because he uses language according not to rules but to deeper laws. Spirit and body are one in it—so sweet and free is the body and so well satisfied is the spirit to inhabit it”⁹The poems “seem almost always to be in the immediate fruit of a definite and particular occasion.” The poems remain true to their occasions by remaining true to their speakers, and nowhere is this more evident than in Burns’s use of the Scots language as an expression of Scotland’s literary identity.

Scots language as a vehicle for Scottish poetry is not without its detractors, and perhaps in the post-Burns literary era of the 19th and 20th century, Hugh MacDiarmid was his harshest critic and one of his most ardent admirers. In his characteristic terse style, MacDiarmid sums up his fellow Scottish poet as “the highest flights of [Burns]—from any high European standard of poetry—may seem like the lamentable efforts of a hen at soaring; no great name in literature Robert Burns.”¹⁰ In Alan Riach’s introduction to the Selected Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid, he contemplates the contradictory nature of MacDiarmid’s poetic connection with Scots language, “Both activities—the reassertion of tradition and the subversion of cultural hegemony were idiosyncratic, but they point toward a distinguishing characteristic of Scottish Literature as a whole, its profound sense of local value stretching back through a distinctly national history, its traditionalism, and simultaneously, its radicalism.”¹¹ Riach goes on to say that in MacDiarmid’s version or form of Scots, mixing the literary and the vernacular, MacDiarmid found that he could give expression to ideas literally inexpressible in English. The language gave him access to nuances of feeling and emotional complexities which contemporary English writing could not embody.

Many of MacDiarmid’s most compelling poems are in a language heightened by his own invention (called Lallans, Synthetic Scots, or Vernacular Scots) based on the Vernacular of the Borders and Scottish Lowlands. After reading the scholarly journal, Lowland Scotch as Spoken in the Lower Strathern District of Perthshire (1915), MacDiarmid found himself producing some of his best known poems. The Irish poet Seamus Heaney recognizes this moment in these terms: “The recorded words and expressions stretched a trip wire in the path of MacDiarmid’s auditory imagination so that he was pitched headlong into his linguistic unconscious, into a network of emotional and linguistic systems that had been in place since childhood.”¹² The Scottish poet Norman MacCaig further establishes MacDiarmid’s reinvention as the poet who speaks the Scots dialect when he says “when he got ahold of John Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of Older Scottish Language, Christopher Murray Grieve (MacDiarmid’s given name) dived in at one end and Hugh MacDiarmid swam ashore at the other.”¹³

Perhaps one of MacDiarmid’s most well-known poems—one of the greatest modernist poems alongside Pound’s Cantos and Eliot’s Waste Land—is “A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle.” The speaker is resolutely Scots, highly literate and quite inebriated. According to Scottish tabloid The Daily Record UK, the twenty-five most used Scottish words for drunk are “Pissed, Goosed, Oot yer tree, Steamboats, Blootered, Rubbered, Sloshed, Steaming, Oot yer t**s, Wasted, Slaughtered, Floored, Ruined, Bladdered, Minced, Reakin, Hammered, Oot the Game, Rat Assed, Sozzled, Guttered, Trollied, Wrecked, Plastered, and Mad wae it.”¹⁴ As he (the poem’s speaker) tumbles into a half-dream stupor beside the thistle in the moonlight, a flood of thoughts, jostling one another for precedence, tumbles out of him. The suppleness of the language is astonishing, its abrupt changes of tone and mood, sometimes within a single stanza or a single line, its natural fusion of reality and fantasy. The Scottish poet Edwin Morgan suggests that in the Scottish language, there is a rhetoric absent from modern English, a facility to harness opposing impulses in a balanced, single statement and more specifically a kind of irony that restrains the southern English writer, which in fact liberates the emancipated Scottish poet. 

In parts the poem is bitingly satirical, particularly at the expense of his pseudo-Scottish sentimental expatriates, the desecrators of Burns, and of the small-minded bourgeoisie who “ca their obstancy ‘Hame.’”¹⁵ The satire on intellectuals and factionalists is shrewd and well-aimed. The poem moves toward a defiant credo pertinent to all MacDiarmid’s work:

I’ll ha’e nae hauf-way hoose, but aye be whaur

Extremes meet—it’s only way I ken

To dodge the curst conceit o’bein richt

That dams the vast majority o’ men. 

In Anne Boutelle’s book, Thistle and Rose: A Study of Hugh MacDiarmid’s Poetry, she likens the lines of poetry as “Man’s nature is revealed through contraries, and any possible unity must take place at the point where extremes meet, where flesh and spirit join in paradoxical synthesis.” The whole approach is close to Blake’s “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise,” and “Without contraries there is no progression.” Blake and MacDiarmid share a common vision: the ultimate triumph and liberation of mankind from all that binds him, a liberation that is made possible by reaching the depths and the heights of all that is human.”¹⁶ Schmidt goes on to suggest that the thistle in “A Drunk Man” modulates from meaning to meaning, altered in the bleary dream. At one moment moonlight metamorphoses into a skeleton—MacDiarmid’s. Then it stands, more conventionally, for Scotland. Later it sprouts a great red rose—not for the Virgin Mary but the General Strike—which deflates like a balloon and the thistle stalk is left literal and poor.¹⁷

While the Scots language or Scots dialect degree of diglossic usage varies from poet to poet, and those variations reflect the different regional accents which include but are not limited to the Glasgow accent, the Edinburgh accent, the northern Highlander accent, and the lower Border accent, the general use of vowels, consonants, suffixes, prefixes, and contractions have a relatively consistent pronunciations. In J. Derek McClure’s book, Scots and its Literature,¹⁸ he defines the conundrum of the Scottish dialect, “The patent etymology unsoundness of the existing orthography, and the perceived inappropriateness of the English-based spelling for a literature proudly asserting its independence from the English Tradition, led several poets of the ‘Scottish Renaissance’ (early to mid-20th century), notably the classist and polyglot scholar Douglas Young, to experiment with new spelling conventions.” In 1947, these were formally codified as the Makar’s (the office of the Scottish Poet Laureate, currently held by the poet Jackie Kay) Style Sheet. Of the rules in the Style Sheet which concern spelling (others relate to grammar), the most important are as follows:

Aa for older “all” and colloquial “a”: caa, baa, smaa, faa, staa. Butava, awa, wha. And snow, blow, braw, etc. 

Ae, ai, ay or aCe for the open sound in fray, frae, hain, cairt, maister, blae, bane, byspale. 

E, ei, ie and i for the sound of ‘i’ in French, according to old usage: heed, deed, heid, deid, hie, Hieland, die; Hevin, sevin, elevin; ,een, yestreen, ambition, king, tradition, sanctified.

Eu for the sound in neuk, deuk, leugh, leukit, beuk, eneuch — pronounced variously from north to south and east to west. 

Y for the diphthong ‘a-i’ in wynd,mynd, hystin distinction to plain short ‘i’ in wind, bind, find. (The practice of dropping the terminal d to be discouraged in writing.) 

Ou mainly for the sound of French ou in mou, mouth, south, sou, about, out... round’, but oo according to old usage in words like smooth, smool, snoove. 

Ow, owe, always for the diphthong in powe, knowe, growe, thow, rowe, gowpit, yowl. 

Ui or uCe for the modified ‘u’ sound, long and short: puir, muir, fluir, guid,tuim, wuid; spune, shune, sune, tune, use, abune. (McClure, 1995)19

While the Style Sheet does attempt to establish a guideline of vowel pronunciation, McClure goes on to say that once these rules were established, they were largely ignored by most poets of the period. Instead, there seems to be a default logic that prefers the phonetic/accent spelling and pronunciation over the academic and undeniably rigid format. What seems to emerge then is the idea of traditionalism and radicalism are employed simultaneously at the writer’s discretion. Creatively speaking, the rules are thrown out for the sake of a more intuitive expression that Riach identified earlier as a “profound sense of the local value stretching back through a distinctly national history” or a national identity embodied by the poet’s connection to his or her poetic and creative impulses. 

Poems composed in Scots were an essential part of developing the overall quality of the anthology, Forty Voices Strong, and their influence on reading the rest of the contribution generated a meaningful portrait of Scottish Poetry. At this point in the discussion and analysis of the contemporary examples of Scots poetry by Leonie Mhari and Andrew McCallum, there will be a conscious shift toward referring to the style of writing as Synthetic Scots, which at first suggests something of a more clinical nature, but in fact reflects the current poetic identities of the writers themselves. The poet and Scots translator of Lewis Carrol’s classic Alice in Wonderland (Ailis’s Anterins i the Laun o Ferlies) explains a contemporary view in his insightful essay “Makkin Ailis in Synthetic Scots,” “Synthetic Scots is an experimental language, which integrates, blends and combines the various dialects of oral Scots with the language of Scotland’s vernacular literary tradition. It originated in the 1920s as an attempt to rescue Scots from the pastoral sentimentality and music-hall self-mockery into which it had degraded, and to extend it to embrace the whole range of contemporary culture functions of a modern literary language. By taking the ingredients of oral Scots (in its various dialects) and literary Scots (as found in the canon of the historical Makars and their inheritors), the intention was to self-consciously construct an idiom which is so alive with modern sensibilities that it cannot be construed—and dismissed—as ‘couthie,’ escapist or parochial.”²⁰

Intentionally constructing an idiom that is alive to the modern sensibilities of Synthetic Scots clearly addresses the first of many layers in Leonie Mhari astonishing poem, “Robbie and the Grizzly Bear.” The narrative voice or speaker of the poem recounts a rite of passage school experience that many would argue is universally common among young boys and girls. However, there a very compelling vicarious quality to the poem that heightens and consequently recognizes a significant moment in an individual’s life. In the poem, Mhari infers previously a kind of reluctance or hesitancy on the part of “Robbie” that in a moment of playground spontaneity discovers a degree of physical and mental confidence and acuity. At first, the comparison of a North American carnivore to a young Scottish boy’s experience may feel like a stretch in lesser hands, but the sudden ferocity, the fishing imagery, the deft, intuitive movements coupled with the magnitude of the boy’s and the speaker’s recollection creates that brilliant poetic leap that immediately closes the gap between two ideas that would otherwise seem incongruous. 

Robbie and the Grizzly Bear

Leonie Mhari

You telt me aboot thon time at school

when you foond your grizzly bear

Push came tae shove

and that shove saw your birled intae the 

ring of boys.

Your hands, nimble fingers quick at tying 

knots for fishing flies 

curled into hard wee fits 

for the fight.

Jabbin, reelin them in,

daring roond the bigger boys 

like a minnow roond stanes in the a rock pool. 

Sleekit wee eel.

All at once takin every trick

from baith the fish and the fisher.

Little on mickle

wi knuckles raised tae your chin

you’d foond that bear

and boy could he roar!

A whistle split the shouts and limbs 

went limp.

You put awa your grizzly,

tied a loose lace,

spat on the scuff and rubbed till it 

shone dull.

You telt meaboot it.

Gid tae ken it was there, you said.

Ah went huntin mine,

a familiar tae get tae know.²¹ 

It might be easy, given the cultural and political circumstances of the country of Scotland to see a David and Goliath scenario played out in this poem. Add to it the iconic name of “Robbie,” the familiar name associated with Robert Burns, not to mention the idea of the scrappy underdog image that is commonly associated in film. But that would immediately confine the poem to an expression of thinly veiled nationalism and not recognize it as an example of the poem as an expression of a poetic truth that remains loyal to the speaker and writer of Synthetic Scots. James Joyce’s well-known quote speaks directly to the heart of Mhari’s poem, “For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.” In the poem, “Robbie and the Grizzly Bear” it is worthwhile idea to invert the Joyce quote as an equally true expression that “the universal is contained by the particular.” It’s in this juxtaposition of cultural and political conditions that the poem has some its most resonating effects, but then adding to it the diglossic nuance of Synthetic Scots the poem encompasses both the impulses of traditionalism and the instincts of radicalism. 

In Andrew McCallum’s poem “Mairi,” he explores the poem’s timeless perception of the individual only known as Mairi from “a wee bairn” (a young child) to a “quine” (a young woman) to an “auld wummin” (an old woman). There are also references to a “loch” and “watters” which evoke the Scottish landscape that continually “whispers” to those who sit at its shores and contemplate the passage and or the journey of a life. In thirteen lines, the poem seeks to look back at the past, acknowledge the present, and conjure an ageless and abiding sense of what it means to examine one’s place in the world. Similarly, in terms of the generational overlapping of who and what “Mairi” represents calls to mind the Scottish/Celtic symbol of the Triquetra comes to mind, this interlocking, organic symbol dates back to early 500 BC when it was used to symbolize the triple goddess (maiden-mother-crone).²²

McCallum’s use of the Synthetic Scots further heightens the poem’s experience of the examination of identity, the etymological claim of language, and the singularity of the poem’s literary achievements.²³ 

Mairi 

For Arnaldur Indridson

She was a wee bairn, settin alane on the shore of a loch, herknin to the whisper frae the watter. 

Syne she was a quine, leukin oot on the loch an seein it bonnieness an the light that seep’t frae oot it. 

Syne she was an auld wummin, hunker aside a bairn; 

syne she was the wee bairn aince mair, herkin to the whisper, an ettlin the forgie o the wuirds; an the whisper cairrit frae the watter an the whisper said—My bairn!²⁴

Besides the generational association, there is also a compelling degree of mystery at work in the poem; McCallum’s use of “whisper” appears in the first stanza as an example of figurative language that would suggest the sound one experiences near a body of water. However, by the time we reach the fourth stanza McCallum endows this “whisper” with greater significance and meaning, namely that the longer one listens to the claim the water exercises over the individual the more compelling it becomes. In a curious reversal, the land and the water claim the people instead of the people claiming what they believe belongs to them. In the usage of Synthetic Scots this idea is heightened in the context of the poem because the supernatural element makes the assertion “my bairn” or my child. McCallum further complicates the voice of the poem by having the landscape and the water speak Synthetic Scots in an expression of authenticity. The poem’s authenticity then relates directly to the intergenerational of the three stages of the female figure, the individual’s gradual and deepening relationship with the landscape and what might be described as the supernatural claim in the voice of Synthetic Scots. This is not necessarily the exclusive permutation of Scottish poets, but it does reflect an impressive tradition of seamlessly combining the geography, the inhabitants, and the indigenous language in a unique and intellectually sophisticated expression. 

The speaker in the poem “Gorse” also by Leonie Mhari does have an agenda, but the poem can’t resist the ambient influences of Scottish life as the poet proposes an alternative plant to symbolically represent Scotland, a yellow-flowered shrub of the pea family originating in North Africa, that can be seen sprouting and sometimes covering the open stretches of the Scottish countryside. There is also a rejection or perhaps a valid substitution of MacDiarmid’s thistle, and in a series of brief references Mhari alludes to athletics (a match), ancient agriculture (fuel and fodder) followed by a more current vision of Scotland, “curry,” “Karaoke,” “coconut-de-cologne-cooncil-juice” and “duty free.” In short work, Mhari encompasses Scottish history from the early inhabitants to contemporary nightlife. The idea of authenticity fashioned out of the diglossic usage harkens toward a more Spoken Word manifesto than a contemplative expression. Mhari, like many of her fellow poets and writers, have been brought to this moment by a combination of political circumstances, increased globalization, and modernization, and in the face of modernization she seeks to unite the landscape with the Scottish landscape in the form of Synthetic Scots. 

Gorse

Let Scotland burn yella,

mak the gorse oor national flooer, 

a blaze tearin across every terrain it lives in: 

the crags, the sands, the fields.

Nae mair singing fur the thistle: 

the one sang wi dour faces afore a match

when we lose.

Gie us back oor brightest bush, 

once mashit fur fuel an fodder.

The one that would sing loudest at a curry 

and karaoke night, 

tarted up in the reek o coconut-de-cologne- 

cooncil-juice. 

She’s been through duty free, been abroad, 

don’t you know?

Cousin o the wispy whin and kenned 

as furze: 

we relish spying them set alight oor land

and roar away the bleak stereotype of 

oor hame, 

makin yella enough o a flag fur us. 

In a short interview Mhari describes her own process, 

I think, like most people who went to school at the same time as me, our learning of literature was through English literature, and everything else was an offshoot, something we saw through an Anglicized eye. So naturally, I wrote in an English too. Only it was an amalgamation of things I’d read but nothing I’d heard, there was nothing natural about it. It was only when I found a voice in Scots that I’d found a voice that was mine, not a mimicry of someone else. There’s an energy in feeling agile and feeling the potential of your language. I don’t always write in Scots, I’ll maybe use words here and there, like I speak it most of the time, but the voice that’s there is always a Scots voice. From there, it’s more possible to reflect on other parts of your identity, and I am more keenly aware of how these parts all move together.²⁵

Again, as readers of Mhari’s and McCallum’s poetry the impulses of traditionalism merges with the instincts of radicalism. Mhari’s poem, “Gorse,” is certainly speaking to Scottish citizens to recognize and embrace their identity not so much as an expression of singular nationalism but as an encouragement to take pride in the nuances of one’s community and culture and perhaps more importantly how it takes its place on the global stage of world communities and world cultures. 

In the months leading up the 2014 bid for Scottish independence, the Scottish actor Gerard Butler recorded a speech, “Scottish Is,” asserting Scottish identity as an encouragement for Scottish people to support the referendum for independence. Arguably, it was a stirring series of description that touted the people, the weather, and stereotypical traits that most Scottish people would probably not mind being associated with in one form or another. Before and certainly after the unsuccessful bid for independence it was quickly lampooned by many Scottish writers, not necessarily as a dismissal of the sentiment, but perhaps more as a humorous claiming that acknowledged the attempt of taking it out of the hands of an advertising agency and putting it into the hands of the poets and writers themselves. Andrew McCallum’s explanation perhaps says it the best, “Scots offers makars (poets) valuable linguistic resources—sounds, rhythms, cognitive content, and an expressiveness—which can extend the range of their own writing. It is also a language that lacks an extensive vocabulary of abstract terms, which compels the makar to express herself via more earthy concrete figures to eschew sterile abstractions and over-intellection. Scots, in short, is a powerfully expressive language which lends itself perfectly to good and powerful writing.” For the next referendum for Scottish independence the Scottish government might call upon the poets and writers of their country to compose a poem in Synthetic Scots to get the job done.

Patrick Moran is the author of five collections of poetry, he is currently a professor of Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

Notes

1. Dickens, Charles, and Daugherty, James. Barnaby Rudge, a Tale of the Riots of ‘80. New York: Heritage Press, 1941.

2. Moran, Patrick. Forty Voices Strong : An Anthology of Contemporary Scottish Poetry. (West Hartford: Grayson Books, 2019).

3. Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect. By Robert Burns. Belfast, 1789.

4. Boutelle, Annie. Thistle and Rose : A Study of Hugh MacDiarmid’s Poetry. First American ed. (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1981).

5. Mackenzie, Henry. The Man of Feeling. (London: Scholartis Press, 1928).

6. Schmidt, Michael. Lives of the Poets. First American ed. (New York: Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 1999).

7. Alloway Kirk or Tam O’Shanter. A Tale. By Robert Burns, The Ayrshire Poet. Glasgow, 1796.

8. Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect. By Robert Burns. Belfast, 1789.

9. Schmidt, Michael. Lives of the Poets.

10. Heaney, Seamus. The Redress of Poetry. First American ed. (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995).

11. MacDiarmid, Hugh. A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1971).

12. Wilson, James. Lowland Scotch as Spoken in the Lower Strathearn District of Perthshire. (London ; New York: Oxford University Press, H. Milford, 1915).

13. MacDiarmid, Hugh. Scottish Eccentrics. Belles Lettres in English. (New York: Johnson Reprint, 1972).

14. Mullen, Kerry. “Twenty Five Scottish Words for Drunk.” dailyrecord, February 18, 2015. https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/weird-news/gallery/twenty-five-scottish-words-drunk-5052460

15. Morgan, Edwin. Essays. (Cheadle: Carcanet Press, 1974).

16. Boutelle, Annie. Thistle and Rose : A Study of Hugh MacDiarmid’s Poetry.