Scottish Modernism and the Celtic world

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter studies the influence of Irish politics and culture on Scottish Modernism and the relationship between the works of Hugh MacDiarmid and James Joyce, with a particular focus on MacDiarmid’s long poems To Circumjack Cencrastus (1930) and In Memoriam James Joyce (1955). MacDiarmid saw Joyce as a fellow Celt and references to Joyce are part of a larger trend in MacDiarmid’s work concerned with the revival and restoration of the Celtic world. As this chapter argues, To Circumjack Cencrastsus and In Memoriam James Joyce are examples of twentieth-century ‘late Celticism’. This chapter also studies the relatively small but highly revealing tradition of Scottish Modernist elegies for deceased modern Irishmen, including Sorley MacLean’s ‘Àrd Mhusaeum na hÈireann’, a tribute to Irish revolutionary James Connolly.