Route maist devious: a study of the works of Sydney Goodsir Smith

Abstract

The decade spanning 1980 to 1990 has seen a proliferation of critical studies and re-appraisal of the nature and development of Scottish literature. In this substantial body ofwork, however, little or no attention has been focused on the works of Sydney Goodsir Smith who, since his death in 1975, has come to seem increasingly isolated and neglected.This thesis then aims to provide the first comprehensive examination of the eclectic span of Goodsir Smith's poetry, fiction and drama. The study draws on interviews with Goodsir Smith's literary contemporaries, family and friends and seeks to relate the works, where relevant, to the socio-political and literary context of the period, while examining some of the significant autobiographical material incorporated in the works.Chapter One focuses on Goodsir Smith's early background and his growing attachment to both Scotland and Scottish literature and studies the nature of his earliest poetry in both Scots and English.Chapter Two looks at the poetry written during World War Two, considers the combined influences of modernism and the Scottish renaissance as well as Goodsir Smith's growing interest in the long poem.The end of World War Two signals the opening of a new phase, at once post-MacDiarmid and post-visionary. Chapters Three and Four of this thesis look at ways in which the literary context was changing and argues that Goodsir Smith's Under The Eildon Tree (1948) can be seen as breaking into new aesthetic areas and perspectives prefiguring developments emerging more fully in the 1950s as what we now recognise as the postmodern.Chapter Five examines what may be termed parallel developments and looks at the shorter poetry written in the immediate post-war period, its related aesthetic components and its powerful biographical substrata.Chapter Six moves into related though radically divergent areas of experimentation, the innovative prose fiction of Carotid Comucopius and the challenging (and to date, unpublished) play Colickie Meg, pursuing the seminal strands of the postmodern. This chapter also considers the more conventional play. The Wallace.Chapter Seven focuses on the complex amalgam of diverse approaches collected in Figs and Thistles, framing the book as ranking, with Under The Eildon Tree, among Goodsir Smith's finest works.Chapter Eight opens with a consideration of some aspects of the longer, more calm, if still deviant and discursive poetry of Goodsir Smith's later years. This leads on to the conclusion of this thesis with an assessment of the nature of Goodsir Smith's achievement. It is argued that not only is his work drastically under-rated, but that it will in the long term be seen as integral to the central experimental thrust of European and Anglo-American literature and as crucial to the development of modern Scottish literature. This is particularly so with regard to Under The Eildon Tree which moves significantly beyond the ground-breaking work of MacDiarmid's A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. It is also argued that this work suggests pathways into the future of Scottish literature which have been far from fully or even usefully explored.