Influences Before he went to university, MacLean was writing in both English and Gaelic. After writing a Gaelic poem, ''A' Chorra-ghritheach'' ("The Heron"), in 1932, he decided to write only in Gaelic and burned his earlier poems. MacLean later said, "I was not one who could write poetry if it did not come to me in spite of myself, and if it came, it had to come in Gaelic". However, it is also clear from his correspondence with MacDiarmid that his choice was also motivated by his determination to preserve and develop the Gaelic language. The Gaelic language had been in decline for several centuries; the 1931 census registered 136,135 Gaelic speakers in Scotland, only 3% of the Scottish population. Despite his decision to write in the language, at times MacLean doubted that
Gaelic would survive and his poetry would be appreciated. For 1,500 years,
Scottish Gaelic literature had developed a rich corpus of song and poetry across "literary, sub-literary, and non-literate"
registers; it retained the ability to convey "an astonishingly wide range of human experience". MacLean's work drew on this "inherited wealth of immemorial generations"; according to MacInnes, few people were as intimately familiar with the entire corpus of Gaelic poetry, written and oral, as MacLean. In particular, MacLean was inspired by the intense love poetry of
William Ross, written in the eighteenth century. Of all poetry, MacLean held in highest regard the Scottish Gaelic songs composed before the nineteenth century by anonymous, illiterate poets and passed down via the oral tradition. He once said that Scottish Gaelic song-poetry was "the chief artistic glory of the Scots, and of all people of Celtic speech, and one of the greatest artistic glories of Europe". at the
Battle of Belchite MacLean once said that various Communist figures meant more to him than any poet, writing to Douglas Young in 1941 that "
Lenin,
Stalin and
Dimitroff now mean more to me than
Prometheus and
Shelley did in my teens". Other left-wing figures that inspired MacLean included
James Connolly, an Irish
trade union leader executed for leading the
Easter Rising;
John Maclean, Scottish socialist and pacifist; and
John Cornford,
Julian Bell, and
Federico García Lorca, who were killed by the
Francoist regime during the
Spanish Civil War. Many of these figures were not Gaels, and some critics have noted MacLean's unusual generosity to non-Gaelic people in his work. Perhaps the one uniting theme in his work is MacLean's
anti-elitism and focus on social justice. Nevertheless, MacLean read widely and was influenced by poets from a variety of styles and eras. Of contemporary poets, Hugh MacDiarmid,
Ezra Pound, and
William Butler Yeats had the greatest impact. After reading
A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle by MacDiarmid, MacLean decided to try his hand at extended narrative poetry, resulting in the unfinished
An Cuilthionn. He was also influenced by the
Metaphysical school. However, he disdained the popular left-wing poets of the 1930s, such as
W. H. Auden or
Stephen Spender, and sometimes regarded poetry as a useless aesthetic hobby.
Dàin do Eimhir In 1940, eight of MacLean's poems were printed in
17 Poems for 6d, along with Scots poems by Robert Garioch. The pamphlet sold better than expected and was reprinted a few weeks later; it received favourable reviews. While MacLean was in North Africa, he left his poetry with Douglas Young, who had promised to help publish it. In November 1943, the poems were published as ''
(). Dàin do Eimhir was a sequence of sixty numbered poems, with twelve missing; of the other poems, the most significant was the long narrative poem An Cuilthionn''. The book marked a sharp break in style and substance of Gaelic poetry from earlier eras. In his poetry, MacLean emphasized the struggle between love and duty, which was personified in the poet's difficulty in choosing between his infatuation with a female figure, Eimhir, and what he sees as his moral obligation to volunteer in the Spanish Civil War. inspired MacLean's poetry The book has been the subject of scholarly debate. Attempting to explain why MacLean's earlier poetry has had the greatest influence,
Derick Thomson wrote that it is love poetry which is most timeless, while MacLean's political poetry has not aged as well. According to
Maoilios Caimbeul, "There is not, and I doubt there will ever be, a series of love poems" that would have as much influence on Gaelic literature.
Ronald Black suggested that "duty [is not]... a comprehensible emotion nowadays" and therefore "the greatest universal in MacLean's verse is the depiction of that extraordinary psychosis which is called being in love". However, this type of commentary has been criticized as an attempt to depoliticize MacLean's work. Seamus Heaney argued that Eimhir was similar to
Beatrice in
Dante's
Divine Comedy, in that Eimhir "resolves at a symbolic level tensions which would otherwise be uncontainable or wasteful". Scottish poet
Iain Crichton Smith said, "there is a sense in which the Spanish Civil War does not form the background to these poems, but is the protagonist". MacLean's work was innovative and influential because it juxtaposed elements from Gaelic history and tradition with icons from mainstream European history. He described his poetry as "radiating from Skye and the West Highlands to the whole of Europe". By this juxtaposition, he implicitly asserted the value of the Gaelic tradition and the right of Gaels to participate as equals in the broader cultural landscape. According to
John MacInnes, MacLean put the much-denigrated Gaelic language and tradition in its proper place, which has a profound effect on Gaelic-speaking readers and is fundamental to their reading of his poetry.
An Cuilthionn, the mountains of Skye are used as a
synecdoche for rifts in European politics, and the suffering of the Gaels due to the Highland Clearances is compared to the suffering of European people under
Francoism and other fascist regimes. MacLean frequently compared the injustice of the Highland Clearances with modern-day issues; in his opinion, the greed of the wealthy and powerful was responsible for many tragedies and social problems. The book won him recognition as "the major force in modern Gaelic poetry", according to
The Cambridge Companion to British Poetry. Caimbeul writes that the poems "capture the uncertainty, pain, yearning, and the search for stability that are at the heart of Modernism". Summarizing the impact of the book, Professor
Donald MacAulay wrote, "After the publication of this book Gaelic poetry could never be the same again."
Recognition Although his poetry had a profound impact on the Gaelic-speaking world, it was not until the 1970s and 1980s that MacLean's work became accessible in English translation. His poetry was not very accessible to Gaelic speakers either, since
Dàin do Eimhir was not reprinted. To English-speakers, MacLean remained virtually unknown until 1970, when issue 34 of
Lines Review was dedicated to his work and some of his poems were reproduced in the anthology
Four Points of the Saltire. In the preface to the collection,
Tom Scott forcefully argued for the merit of MacLean's poetry. Iain Crichton Smith published an English translation of
Dàin do Eimhir in 1971. MacLean was part of the delegation that represented Scotland at the first
Cambridge Poetry Festival in 1975, establishing his reputation in England. He was one of five Gaelic poets to be anthologized in the influential 1976 collection
Nua-Bhàrdachd Ghàidhlig / Modern Scottish Gaelic Poems with
verse translations by the authors. MacLean's verse translations were also included in later publications. In 1977,
Canongate Books published
Reothairt is Contraigh: Taghadh de Dhàin 1932–72 (). MacLean changed the ordering of the
Dàin do Eimhir sequence, altering many poems and omitting others. In the original version of
An Cuilthionn, MacLean had asked the
Red Army to invade Scotland. This passage was expunged, among other alterations and omissions that led the Scottish Poetry Library to describe the 1977 version as having been "
bowdlerized". MacLean said that he would only consent to publishing the parts of his older work that he found "tolerable". The critical acclaim and fame that MacLean achieved was almost entirely from critics who did not understand his poetry in the original Gaelic. In 1989, a further compilation of his poetry,
O Choille gu Bearradh / From Wood to Ridge: Collected Poems in Gaelic and English won him lasting critical acclaim. Complete annotated editions of his work have since been published. , made famous by MacLean's 1954
poem From the early 1970s, MacLean was in demand internationally as a reader of his own poetry. He would start a reading of a poem by describing the images, then read the poem first in Gaelic and again in English, emphasizing that the translations were not to be read as poems in themselves. His readings were described as deeply moving even by listeners who did not speak Gaelic; according to
Seamus Heaney, "MacLean's voice had a certain bardic weirdness that sounded both stricken and enraptured". Gaelic poet George Campbell Hay wrote in a review that MacLean "is gifted with what the Welsh call
Hwyl, the power of elevated declamation, and his declamation is full of feeling." These readings helped establish his international reputation as a poet. MacLean's poetry was also translated into
German, and he was invited to poetry readings in Germany and Austria. In the English-speaking world, MacLean's best-known poem is
Hallaig, a meditation on a Raasay village which had been cleared of its inhabitants. Raasay was cleared between 1852 and 1854 under
George Rainy; most of its inhabitants were forced to emigrate. Many of MacLean's relatives were affected, and Hallaig was one of the villages to be depopulated. The poem was written a century later, during MacLean's time in Edinburgh, and originally published in 1954 in the Gaelic-language magazine
Gairm. Beginning with the famous line, "Time, the deer, is in the wood of Hallaig", the poem imagines the village as it was before the Clearances, with the long-dead eternally walking through the trees. It is also filled with local names of individuals and places, which have deeper meanings to those intimately familiar with Raasay oral tradition. Unlike most of MacLean's output,
Hallaig has no overt political references, and never directly mentions eviction or clearance. For this reason, it was seen as politically "safer" than others of MacLean's poems. Translated and promoted by Irish Nobel Prize Laureate Seamus Heaney,
Hallaig achieved "cult status" and came to symbolize Scottish Gaelic poetry in the English-speaking imagination.
Style MacLean's poetry generally followed an older style of metre, based on the more dynamic patterns of the oral tradition rather than the strict, static metres of the written Gaelic poetry of the nineteenth century. He frequently combined metrical patters and shifted in the middle of a poem, achieving "sensuous effects" that cannot be translated. He typically used the traditional
vowel rhymes, both internal and end-rhymes, that are ubiquitous in the oral tradition, but a few of his poems have less traditional rhyme schemes. However, he was flexible in his use of metre, "[combining] old and new in such a way that neither neutralizes each other," extending rather than repudiating tradition, in a way that is unique in Gaelic poetry. In MacInnes' analysis, "rhythmic patterns become a vital part of the meaning" of MacLean's poetry. Over time, his poems became less strict in their application of rhyme and metre. According to MacInnes, labels such as "
classical" and "
romantic", which have been applied respectively to the form and content of MacLean's poetry, are misleading because MacLean did not limit himself by those styles. Despite MacLean's reliance on the oral tradition, his poetry was not intended to be sung. Although he abandoned the "verbal codes" and intricate symbolism of the Gaelic tradition, MacLean occasionally used outmoded devices, such as the repeating of adjectives. MacLean's poetry frequently used Gaelic themes and references, such as
place names, trees, and sea symbolism. A knowledge of that tradition would bring additional interpretations and appreciation to a reading of MacLean's poetry. Another important symbol in his work is the face, which represents romantic love. According to John MacInnes, MacLean's poetry "exhibits virtually an entire spectrum of language". Some of his poetry is transparent to a fluent Gaelic speaker, but the meaning of other poems needs to be untangled. MacLean coined very few neologisms; however, he revived or repurposed many obscure or archaic words. MacLean often said that he had heard these old words in Presbyterian sermons. According to MacInnes and
Maoilios Caimbeul, MacLean's revival of these old, forgotten Gaelic words revolutionized literary Gaelic, by adding senses and a newness and modernity. Caimbeul wrote that MacLean's vocabulary is not "simple", but it is "natural" and arises naturally from everyday speech, although mixed with other influences. In contrast, the English translations were all written in a very straightforward style, flattening the language by the necessity to choose one English word for the ambiguity and connotations of the Gaelic one. According to
Christopher Whyte, the English translations produce "an official interpretation, one that restricts and deadens the range of possible readings of the poem". English could not convey the pop that MacLean's revival of disused words brought to his Gaelic poetry. While the Gaelic poems were noted for their acoustic properties, the translations did not pay any particular attention to sound, instead focusing narrowly on literal meaning. MacLean emphasized that his "line-by-line translations" were not poetry; of the prose translation of
An Cuilthionn that appeared in
Dàin do Eimhir, he wrote, "my English version has not even the merit of very strict literal accuracy as I find more and more when I look over it". Seamus Heaney called the translations "
cribs". ==Awards and honours==