Looking Back: MacDiarmid: A Religious Poet?

From August 1974

By JB Logan

Scotland’s most distinguished (and often most cantankerous) living poet is scarcely at first sight notable for his godly ballads. But John B Logan thinks that MacDiarmid is at heart a ‘rebel with a Christ complex’ who should be read more by ‘theologians and concerned Christians’.

It is essential, if we are to get a balanced view of the arts in Scotland, to reconsider the importance of Dr Christopher Murray Grieve, alias Hugh MacDiarmid, whom Professor David Daiches calls ‘one of the very great poets of our time’, and competent critics rate with Dunbar and Burns as our foremost poets.

Anticipating the common Scots and conventional denigration of our geniuses and the natural reaction of sensitive piety to his exaggerated invective, passion, and prejudice – but remembering King David and the authors of the imprecatory psalms – look at this fingerpost to God:

“Oot o’ my way, my senses, five,

I ken a’ you can tell,

Oot o’ my way, my thochts, for noo

I maun meet God myself.”

The Scots Christian poetess, Helen B Cruikshank, commenting, calls him ‘ a releegious poet, the foremaist ane frae John O’ Groats to Wamphray’.

CHRIST COMPLEX

Christian artistic comprehension can surely discern beneath his Scots artistic and radical violence a genuine inspiration, basically a mania for ultimate, righteousness in all human relationships, with biting prophetic criticism in the spirit of Christ in the temple exposing the evils of ecclesiastical institutionalism:

“The Kirk in Scotland still I cry

Crooks whaur it canna crucify.”

Honesty must agree. But here what is important is his Christ complex. His Collected Poems (1962) begin with a number of religious lyrics – A Moment in Eternity (1923) – “I shone within my thoughts as God within us shines.” Then I Heard Christ Sing; The Innumerable Christ (for Professor JY Simpson of New College); the moving echo of the Godly Ballates, a Nativity lullaby, “His mither sings to the bairnie Christ”. His passion for the poor and neglected reveals the basic of his very idealistic forms of Communism and Scottish Nationalism. If only he had seen Christians and the Churches showing genuine active involvement in such problems….

But MacDiarmid’s great achievement is to have established the literary standard that nothing but supreme art with international contacts and recognition is good enough for Scotland. His major work, The Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle, pictures the modern Scot in search of his soul, for the meaning of life.

Recently when he spoke and read his work in Ochtertyre Theatre, in a conversation he told me that his theology had centred in Martin Buber of I And Thou fame, and he has read a great deal of and about Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr.

It is time that theologians – and concerned Christians – read more MacDiarmid.

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