Sorley MacLean
 
 
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life
University Days (1929-1933)

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In 1929 Sorley MacLean, aged 18, went to Edinburgh to sit the Bursary Competition of the University of Edinburgh, and thereafter began his studies at the University, after having been among the successful candidates. When he arrived in the autumn of 1929, he was still uncertain whether to study Celtic, or History or English.

He opted for English, and graduated with First Class Honours in English in 1933, although later he was less convinced that he had made the correct choice. In the end it was the economic reality that shaped his decision, since degrees in Gaelic did not promise many job opportunities. He would later observe: ‘By the time I was in my second year I was greatly sorry I was taking a degree in English because I was interested only in poetry and only in some poetry at that. I wasn’t interested in prose and I was sorry I didn’t do Hons. Gaelic.’

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Sorley MacLean came under the influence of Professor Herbert Grierson (1866-1960), Regius Professor of English Literature from 1915 to 1935, in the Department of English, and at this time the young poet wrote both in English and Gaelic. The earlier literary influences of Blake, Shelley and the Classical Greek and Roman poets had been superseded by his interest in the poetry of John Donne, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. He came to feel that his poems in English were ‘over-self-conscious’, and that what he wrote in Gaelic was better.

In 1931, he wrote of one of his early Gaelic poems ‘A’ Chorra-Gridheach’: ‘I thought it better than any of my English stuff, and because of that – but also for patriotic reasons – I stopped writing verse in English and destroyed all the English stuff I could lay hands on’.  Most of his English verse had been destroyed by the time he was twenty. One surviving early and rare example appeared in Private Business, a small pamphlet edited by David Daiches, and published by the English Literature Society of the University of Edinburgh in 1933.

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During his time at the University, Sorley MacLean was a member of Edinburgh University Labour Club. His Highland background and the influence of the Highland Clearances on Skye and Raasay aroused in him strong political passions, which in the events of the 1930s conspired to strengthen his hatred of Fascism. In terms of friendships, he seems to have associated with the Highland set in Edinburgh at that time, which included the brothers Angus and William Matheson and James Carmichael Watson.

In 1933, in his last year at University, Sorley MacLean got to know George E. Davie
(later the author of The Democratic Intellect and teacher of philosophy at Edinburgh University) and James B. Caird (later an Inspector of Schools), who introduced him to the work of Hugh MacDiarmid. Both men had a complementary influence on him: ‘George Davie had a tremendous knowledge of all kinds of things in Scotland, and he was fundamentally interested in ideas and his range was immense; Caird was, I think, outstanding, as I said, in his combination of literature and what I would call sensibility’. His introduction through these two friends to the early lyrics of Hugh MacDiarmid, and the influence of his own reading of Benedetto Croce’s The Defence of Poetry, influenced him profoundly and ‘confirmed my belief in the supremacy of the lyric and the lyrical nature of poetry’.

After graduating Sorley MacLean spent a year at Moray House Teachers’ Training College, and it was while he was completing his studies there that he made the acquaintance of the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, with whom he formed a friendship that continued until the latter’s death in 1978. By 1934, when the two met, MacDiarmid was already interested in Gaelic poetry, and shortly after their first encounter, Sorley MacLean agreed to translate some of the Gaelic poems of Alexander MacDonald and Duncan Ban MacIntyre for MacDiarmid.  In the autumn of 1934, his studies completed, the young Sorley MacLean returned to Skye.


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