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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Problematics of Bonds in Hugh MacDiarmid's Poetry

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Hugh MacDiarmid is considered the most important Scottish poet of the 20th century. He is mostly celebrated for the Scots lyrics he wrote in the 1920s and his long poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, published in 1926. Because of their fragmentation, the poems of the Thirties, most of which were part of the unpublished project Mature Art, and In Memoriam James Joyce (1955), have not attracted the same critical attention. However, they represent the culmination of a very complex stylistic crisis that this study offers to analyse thanks to the question of bonds, especially problematic bonds. The poetry portrays humanity torn by social division, treason and death, but it deals with loss too, with a fundamental and founding loss for modern men: the loss of God, the embodiment of transcendent otherness. A diachronic analysis of the poems reveals how the transformation of MacDiarmid’s poetry may be understood as a rupture with the divine and as a process of secularisation. From A Drunk Man, the enunciator, the intertextual methods and the rhythm of the poetry change so as to allow the emergence of materialist lists and catalogues. Thanks to immanent terms and to the imitation of the infinite form of the pibroch, the poems display a post-Christian philosophy that abandons the concept of ending but retains that of end (aim). Humanity and poetry are still turned towards an immanent form of otherness, though one which they cannot reach. Finally, despite the pain caused by a never-ending quest for meaning, poetic writing makes serenity possible through the appearance of a vital existential option: sharing.