Albyn by Hugh MacDiarmid — Read

Not Burns-Dunbar! That is the phrase which sums up the significant tendency which is belatedly manifesting itself in Scots poetry to-day. At first it may seem absurd to try to recover at this time of day the literary potentialities of a language which has long ago disintegrated into dialects. These dialects even at their richest afford only a very restricted literary medium, capable of little more than kailyard usages, but quite incapable of addressing the full range of literary purpose. They are the _disjecta membra_ of a language; the question is, whether they can be re-integrated and re-vitalized.

Can these dry bones live? Like feats have at all events been accomplished elsewhere-in regard to Provencal in France, Catalan in Spain, the Landsmaal in Norway, and so on. Those who would try it in Scots must first of all recover for themselves the full canon of Scots used by the Auld Makars and readapt it to the full requirements of modern self-expression. This is no easy task. Why should it be attempted? One answer is because English is incapable of affording means of expression for certain of the chief elements of Scottish psychology-just as English has no equivalents for many of the most distinctive words in the Scots vocabulary. Another answer is that there is a tendency in world-literature to-day which is driving writers of all countries back to obsolete vocabularies and local variants and specialized usages of language of all kinds. This is not the place to more than indicate considerations such as these. Suffice it to say that a little group of Scottish writers to-day are alive to them and conscious of an overwhelming impulse to return more deeply "into the pit whence we were digged" than any Scot has felt impelled to go for several centuries. Burns, although he used a certain amount of synthetic Scots of his own, not sticking to any one dialect and recovering words that had ceased to be used, did not know the works of his great fifteenth-century predecessors well enough to make anything like full use of the linguistic material available. This is what makes Carlyle say that if Burns had been "a first-class intellectual workman he might have changed the whole course of literature. " That opportunity still remains open, however, for anyone who can revive the potentialities of the Scots language manifested in Dunbar and since then almost wholly forgone in favour of the very different potentialities of English.