The Poetry Of Sorley Maclean

This 10-hour free course introduced the poetry of Sorley Maclean, the contexts that inform it and the importance of the Gaelic language to his work.

Along with his contemporaries Edward Morgan and Hugh MacDiarmid, Sorley MacLean is recognised as one of the most important Scottish poets of the 20th century. This book offers a detailed study of MacLean's poems, providing insight into the context of his work.

Although the number of Gaelic speakers has declined during the twentieth century, the last forty years have seen an astonishing flowering of Scottish Gaelic poetry, much of it in the modern idiom. This bilingual anthology provides a selection of the best work of poets who have contributed most to that revival--Sorely Maclean, George Campbell Hay, Derick Thomson, Iain Crichton Smith, and Donald MacAulay.

Sorley MacLean (Somhairle MacGill-Eain 1911-1996) is generally recognised as the most significant writer in Scottish Gaelic of the twentieth century. Yet his work possesses a relevance extending far beyond the bounds of his nation or his language. His 1943 collection D'in do Eimhir agus D'in Eile(Poems to Eimhir) brought Gaelic poetry abreast of the modern world with breathtaking and notorious effectiveness. The love sequence at its core shows a young man battling with the conflicting claims of love and duty against the background of a continent hurtling unstoppably into all-out war. His political poem An Cuilithionn (The Cuillin) links the tragedy of the Highland Clearances with a tradition of left-wing radicalism which had the French and Bolshevik revolutions as its highpoints. His work was characterised by a mixture of reticence and outspokenness. The love sequence could not be published in its entirety while he was alive, and An Cuilithionn waited half a century before finally appearing in an abridged and shortened form. This definitive edition brings together everything published during the poet's life time and the love sequence in its fullest form, along with extracts from the 1939 manuscript of An Cuilithionn and a generous selection of unpublished poems. MacLean's own English versions are complemented, where necessary, by versions from the editors. A section of notes highlights historical and traditional references, and two maps and a glossary of place-names are provided.

This text provides the love poems of Sorley MacLean with translations by Iain Crichton Smith face to face. It also contains an obituary by Smith for MacLean and a tribute to both poets by Professor Donald Meek."

Sorley MacLean is undoubtedly the most influential and significant Gaelic poet of the 20th century, and this collection features over seventy of his poems.