ABSTRACT
The traditional opposition between literary and colloquial language assumes that speech-forms actually used by communities in their everyday lives are ill suited for poetry, as suggested by Sidney Goodsir Smith’s quote above. In order to explore the debate surrounding this assumption, this paper provides an overview of the use of Scots in 20th-century Scottish poetry and confronts it with the linguistic choices of Scotland’s most radical contemporary poet, Tom Leonard, who conveys the specific voice of the Glaswegian dialect.
After a presentation of the linguistic context of Lowland Scotland, including the controversial question of the exact status and limits of Scots, this paper proposes a comparison between some emblematic poems in Scots about Scots, written between the late 19th century and the late 20th century. This comparison illustrates some implications of the use of a Scottish dialect/language in poetry, from the expression of romantic nostalgia to nationalism and to the denunciation of social injustice. In parallel, this comparison offers interesting insight into the evolution of the modes of representing Scots/Scottish English in writing.
This comparative overview closes with a sociolinguistic analysis of Tom Leonard’s phonetic poems, investigating the implications of his idiosyncratic linguistic choices. The spelling that he uses reflects his desire to distance himself both from English and from traditional Scots, thereby giving flesh to a uniquely Glaswegian voice while rejecting the political agenda of the Scottish Renaissance poets. By doing so, he gives substance to his motto: “No tribe nor nation but community—& the music of its language-pool” and he demonstrates, if need be, that urban working-class dialects can unquestionably be a valid medium for poetry.
