The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse. Edited by Robert Crawford and Mick Imlah. Allen Lane/The Penguin Press. 554pp, £20 in UK
Few took Hugh MacDiarmid seriously in the 1930s when he argued that the British Empire was in its last days and that its collapse would be followed by a radical reappraisal of the status of the literature of England. Yet the empire was in ruins within a couple of decades, and well before the end of the century Eng Lit academics across the globe - not least in England itself - had made exposure of the imperialist, racist and sexist assumptions underlying the old Oxbridge canon a main part of their business. The loss of empire, claimed MacDiarmid, would lead to the break-up of Britain and to the long overdue emergence of Scottish culture and politics from the shadow of the Predominant Partner.
If history has not borne out his prediction of full independence by the year 2000, it has witnessed both the creation of the first Scottish Parliament in three centuries and an extraordinary explosion of national self-confidence among younger Scots, reflected in major contemporary achievement in film, fiction and the visual arts. Robert Crawford and Mick Imlah's ambitious anthology re-envisages the Scottish literary past in the light of these developments. It is the New Penguin book both because it replaces Tom Scott's useful but narrow 1970 anthology, and because it presents a full-scale attempt at self-definition by the new "postcolonial" nation.
The patriotic agenda of the book has drawn adverse criticism south of the Border, where the editors have been accused of glossing over Scotland's imperial past. The Scots did indeed make a central, enthusiastic contribution to the Empire - always a British rather than just an English affair - as engineers, administrators, missionaries and frequently murderous soldiers. While the editors could perhaps have been more forthright about all this, criticism of them is misplaced to the extent that their primary duty is the selection of representative texts, and literature in Scotland has been notably skeptical with regard to the dominant national values - Kirk, respectability and Empire - ever since a parcel of rogues voted the Scottish Parliament out of existence in 1707. Burns's poetry is by turns Jacobite and Jacobin in its unease with the Hanoverian succession. Scott's novels, for all their overt conservatism, are powerfully disturbed by the political energies they seek to discredit. In the early 20th century, writers as different as MacDiarmid, Edwin Muir, Somhairle MacGill-Eain and Neil M. Gunn were united by the conviction that the Reformation had had a disastrous effect on their country, cutting it off from its ancient links with the continental mainland (and with Ireland) and legitimising a stultifying anti-intellectualism. They began in the inter-War years to dismantle the idea of the Scot as Teutonic in speech, Protestant in religion, industrial-capitalist in economics and Imperial in affiliation.
That process reaches its apotheosis in the New Penguin Book, where Scots and English poems jostle with texts in Gaelic (neurotically absent from most Scottish literary histories), Irish (Mugron of Iona, Muireadhach Albanach O Dalaigh), Old Norse, Old French, Anglo-Saxon, Welsh (Y Gododdin appears to have been composed in Strathclyde) and Latin (Columba, the Renaissance humanists George Buchanan and Arthur Johnston).
Some of the pre-modern poems here relate to a territory rather than a nation, it must be observed, but their presence stimulatingly widens the scope of debate about Scottishness. English-language poets include Mary Queen of Scots and Byron. The latter is Scottish by virtue not alone of blood and of an Aberdeen boyhood, but of a turn of mind and phrase he shares with poets from Dunbar in the 15th century through Fergusson and Burns to Norman MacCaig and Tom Leonard - a gleeful reductive capacity which makes his adaptation of ottava rima in Don Juan, with its devastating final couplet, seem as homegrown a form as the Burns stanza.
Despite the extraordinary diversity of the voices collected here, a number of attitudes recur across the barriers of time and language - a tough-minded acknowledgement of the materiality of things, a distrust of affectation and privilege, a passionate concern for a nation that has spent much of the last millennium "stade in perplexite" (stood in perplexity) as an anonymous 13th-century poem puts it. Here is the best of Scotland's poetry, as parti-coloured as a plaid, as spiky and difficult to suppress as a field of thistles.
Patrick Crotty teaches at St Patrick's College, Drumcondra, in Dublin. He is joint editor of the forthcoming Complete Collected Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid which will be published by Carcanet in three volumes from 2002 to 2004