Hugh MacDiarmid’s ‘On Raised Beach’: ‘Geopoetics’ in a Time of Catastrophic Crisis’

Abstract

The poet Hugh MacDiarmid (1892–1978) was the major driving force behind the twentieth-century Scottish literary renaissance and was also a passionate Scottish nationalist. His poem ‘On a Raised Beach’ (1934) has been understood in theological and philosophical terms as a metaphysical exploration, albeit one grounded in an immediate experience of nature that took place on Shetland. In this paper, MacDiarmid’s epic is placed in the context of the present environmental crisis and the ongoing consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. ‘On a Raised Beach’ can now be re-located within the hermeneutical tradition of ‘Geopoetics’, a Scottish genre that is articulated and asserted by the poet Kenneth White (1938–). Whilst, however, White draws upon the highly contested and polyvalent concept of ‘shamanism’ in elaborating his standpoint, we shall argue that it is also appropriate to look for affinities between this dynamic poem and the ethos and mysticism of ‘deep ecology’, a perspective that invokes the equally contested mythology of ‘Gaia’.

Keywords

• Geopoetics
• crisis
• nature
• pandemic
• Hugh MacDiarmid
• deep ecology