ABSTRACT
Ireland has been the most obvious case, and that requires another section in this survey. But even in the 1990s there have been passionate and passionately articulated, manifestations of separateness in Scotland and in Wales. Introductions to recent anthologies of verse from these countries give one texts by which to argue what might be true here, what merely contentious; and, when Scottish and Welsh poets are enlisted into 'British' anthologies, and when these poets appear to take their own stand on their own ground, there is cause for reflection. The so-called Scottish Renaissance has looked to the poet Hugh MacDiarmid at least as far back as the 1920s. Now, in his eighties, Norman MacCaig can look back on a lifetime of elegant, polished, exact dandification, untroubled by nationalist incursions. George Mackay Brown writes almost exclusively about his native Orkney, cold, rocky, depopulated, a place of shepherds, fishermen, and memories of the distant Norse past of feud and destruction.
