Sherry Chandler

Jesse Stuart, the Appalachian Hugh MacDiarmid?

It struck me that the following passage, from Seamus Heaney’s essay “A Torchlight Procession of One” on the Scottish nationalist poet Hugh MacDiarmid, could also describe the man who might be called an Appalachian nationalist poet, Jesse Stuart. Both men were what you might call vernacular poets. McDiarmid’s work preceded Stuart’s by about ten years:

He was very clear-headed about his productions and in the 1960s wrote to a BBC producer as follows: “My job, as I see it, has never been to lay a tit’s egg, but to erupt like a volcano, emitting not only flame, but a lot of rubbish.” From a person of less abundant capacity and with a less compulsive appetite for overdoing things, this could have sounded like an excuse; from MacDiarmid, however, it emerges as a boast. With him, the speech from the dock is sure to be a roar of defiance. No wonder Norman MacCaig suggested that the anniversary of his death should be marked each year by the observance of two minutes of pandemonium. “He would walk into my mind,” MacCaig said at the graveside in Langholm in 1978, “as if it were a town and he a torchlight procession of one, lighting up the streets…”

Still, although his vitality was epoch-making, MacDiarmid has probably written more disconcertingly than any other major twentieth-century poet. Anybody who wishes to praise the work has to admit straight away that there is an un-get-roundable connection between the prodigality of his gifts and the prodigiousness of his blather. The task for everybody confronted with the immense bulk of his collected verse is to make a firm distinction between the true poetry and what we might call the habitual printout.

— Seamus Heaney, “A Torchlight Procession of One: On Hugh MacDiarmid” in The Redress of Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), pp 104-105