A route maist devious : a study of the works of Sydney Goodsir Smith

• Main Author: Nairn, Thomas
• Published: University of Edinburgh 1994
• Subjects: 820.90091
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.659858

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areas of experimentation, the innovative prose fiction of Carotid Cornucopius and the challenging (and to date unpublished) play Colickie Meg pursuing the seminal strands of the postmodern. Chapter Seven provides a consideration of Goodsir Smith's later poetry, moving from the complex amalgam of diverse approaches collected in Figs and Thistles on to the longer more calm if still deviant and discursive poetry of his later years. Chapter Eight concludes this thesis with a summation of Goodsir Smith's achievement and argues that not only is his work drastically underrated, 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 in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. It is also argued that in contemporary terms this work suggests pathways to the future of Scottish literature which have been far from fully or even usefully explored.