The Autodidact

When James and Elizabeth Grieve moved their young family to Parliament Square in the centre of Langholm in 1899 they unwittingly introduced Christopher, their eldest son, to a realm that was to dominate his adult life, one through which he would both challenge the power of metropolitan English rule and conform to the dictates of native national mythology. MacDiarmid's book learning – never systematic, or systematised by a university education, always driven by his own idiosyncratic needs as a poet – began with his omnivorous trawling through the library that occupied the upper storey of the building in which the family lived. MacDiarmid claims it was access to this library ‘that was the great determining factor’ (LP, 8) in his becoming a poet, boasting somewhat fantastically in Lucky Poet of having read every book in the library before the age of fourteen – some twelve thousand volumes.

Such exaggerations in the cause of self-styling are common throughout MacDiarmid's career and are hardly unknown amongst poets. Robert Crawford describes MacDiarmid and Ezra Pound as ‘man-myths’. Fellow modernist, political extremist and autobiographical fabulist, Pound was one of MacDiarmid's heroes, also preferring a poetics of lengthy, generalist displays of learning. In Lucky Poet, once more in braggart mode, MacDiarmid claims, ‘I could go up into that library in the dark and find any book I wanted’ – a library that was, however, ‘strangely deficient in Scottish books’ (LP, 8). It took this Scottish autodidact until the age of twenty-seven to find his way out of the darkness into which Scottish culture had allowed itself to fall as ‘an inevitable consequence of the relation of Scotland to England’ (LP, 15).