POETRY
Essentiality of form
MICHAEL KLIMES
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Norman MacCaig’s ideological view was that poetry should ‘examine the emotional and intellectual meaning of any event and any word.’
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When Norman MacCaig died in 1996, his death represented more than just Scotland losing one of its great literary talents since MacCaig was widely seen as the nation’s foremost living poet. There were other noteworthy losses during the same year
, those of George Mackay Brown and Sorley MacLean. These three very important poets had all been attached to the Scottish Renaissance (led by Hugh MacDiarmid) in some way and their deaths showed that an era was coming to end.
MacCaig’s best work was, and still is, the equal of what his most formidable competitors could produce in English. MacCaig can rest on any shelf alongside Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes and Derek Walcott without needing to sweat too much. His definitive Collected Poems was published two years ago, edited by his son Ewen McCaig with an introduction by author and critic Alan Taylor.
Subtle rhyming
Taylor elaborates how MacCaig as a person fed into his poetry and vice versa. MacCaig as a person is difficult to prise apart from his art since much of his writing “relates to himself and his being in the cosmos, as if he is trying to see where he fits in and learn what he has to contribute”. MacCaig studied Classics at Edinburgh University and this taught him the essentiality of form. Much of his poetry is an affirmation of Flaubert’s golden rule, “you must not think the feeling is everything…Art is nothing without form.” His work throughout the 1940s,1950s and 1960s was precise but subtle rhyming verse. Later it became much freer yet he never lost the economy and clarity that enabled him to write at such a high standard.
By far, the most important element of MacCaig’s work is his use of landscape. He divided most of his life between the two locales of Edinburgh and Assynt (a remote area in North-West Scotland) which fused together to create the soil that he ploughed for inspiration. Both these places gave his poetic tone a distinct Scottish accent. Roughly speaking, his work can be placed between the ‘urban’ and the ‘rural’. In Edinburgh, he focused on its history and architecture; in the mountains of Assynt, he became the celebratory nature poet writing about the frogs, fish, stags, lochs, seas and birds that he loved. Although the two locations were the foundations for his work, the finer details came from elsewhere.
MacCaig’s themes were very similar to one of his biggest poetic influences: Wallace Stevens. He wrote numerous meditations where he was examining the relationship between reality and imagination and how they are dialectical. A perfect example is “Painting – The Blue Jar” or one of his most famous poems “Summer Farm” where the object under consideration, the jar or the farm is a product of the mind and inseparable from it.
Another formative influence was Socrates or one of “the big men”, as MacCaig called them. Socrates is a bit of a celebrity in MacCaig’s work, making frequent appearances. Socrates acts as model for MacCaig in two ways. The first is he uses his poetry as a mechanism to perform Socratic dialogues in ‘which the poet, in a quest for self-knowledge, interrogates himself.’ Secondly, Socrates is a symbol of truth and truth finding for MacCaig. He says of Socrates in the poem ‘Clio’, ‘he was, himself’ when he died. This emblem of the philosopher being a truth finder fits into MacCaig’s ideological view that the role of poetry is to, ‘examine the emotional and intellectual meaning of any event and any word.’
One major advantage MacCaig’s Collected Poems has over others is that the publishers decided to include snippets from MacCaig’s interviews, revealing insightful thoughts on how to write poetry, writing in general and how he worked himself. MacCaig said, ‘the poem…comes easily and quickly and pretty often with no correction at all.’ He was a ‘hit and miss’ poet who wrote prolifically and discarded what he did not like. He left 600 poems when he died, 99 of them were selected for his collected poems yet perhaps the most remarkable fact of MacCaig’s body of work is aging did not hamper his industriousness or his consistent quality. The publication of Ted Hughes’s colossal collected poems in 2003 along with Robert Lowell’s voluminous collected poems in the same year reminds us how they were huge presences on their sides of the Atlantic yet had major lapses. By comparison, MacCaig did not write a tract of poems which can be forgotten. His last poems are as good if not better than his first ones.
Political orientation
MacCaig’s political orientation is worth mentioning. He was a pacifist and a conscientious objector during World War II, spending 93 days in prison. However, his poetry was not overtly political although his most epic and longest poem, “A Man in Assynt” attacks “English business man and indifference/of a remote and ignorant government”.
Another part of MacCaig that must not be overlooked is how his influence spread through his popular readings where his distinctly piercing voice (it did not have the musicality of Dylan Thomas but was far more appealing than T.S. Eliot’s) enriched his poetry. He also taught creative writing at the University of Edinburgh and later the University of Stirling.
Over his lifetime MacCaig demonstrated through his achievements that he was one of the essential poets, not only of his generation but of half a century. He wrote, read, taught and made himself accessible to other people. He said in “Praise of a man”: The beneficent lights dim/But don’t vanish. The razory edges/dull but still cut. He’s gone: but you can see/his tracks still, in the snow of the world.
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