stanza XXIX: Though all unask'd his birth or name...): The Highlanders, who carried hospitality to a punctilious excess, are said to have considered it as churlish, to ask a stranger his name or lineage, before he had taken refreshment. Feuds were so frequent among them, that a contrary rule would, in many cases, have produced the discovery of some circumstance, which might have excluded the guest from the benefit of the assistance he stood in need of. Bill Findlay (ed.), Frae Ither Tongues: essays on modern translations into Scots (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2004) [two essays on Garioch]

From a Window in Princes Street - to M.M.M'B - Princes Street, Edinburgh, Scotland - Princes St, Edinburgh, City of Edinburgh EH2 2, UK MacCaig was into his thirties before he published two books of poems. These belonged to the Neo-Apocalyptic School, rampant on the ‘Celtic Fringes’ in the 1940s. Later, he disavowed them to the extent that one fancied that only an innate respect for scholarship prevented him destroying the copies lodged in the National Library of Scotland. As that school went, they weren’t bad. He came into his own, though, in his forties, with Riding Lights, published in 1955. At this point he might be, and was, mistaken for a Scottish relative of the Movement. Such as might suit the spectre's child.......): It was a natural attribute of such a character as the supposed hermit, that he should credit the numerous superstitions with which the minds of ordinary Highlanders are almost always embued. A few of these are slightly alluded to in this stanza The River Demon, or River-horse, for it is that form which he commonly assumes, is the Kelpy of the Lowlands, an evil and malicious spirit, delighting to forebode and to witness calamity. He frequents most Highland lakes and rivers; and one of his most memorable exploits was performed upon the banks of Loch-Vennachar, in the very district which forms the scene of our action: it consisted in the destruction of a funeral procession, with all its attendants. The "noontide hag," called in Gaelic Glas-lich, a tall, emaciated, gigantic female figure, is supposed in particular to haunt the district of Knoidart. A goblin dressed in antique armour, and having one hand covered with blood, called, from that circumstance, Lham-dearg, or Red-hand, is a tenant of the forests of Glenmore and Rothemurcus. Other spirits of the desert, all frightful in shape, and malignant in disposition, are believed to frequent different mountains and glens of the Highlands, where any unusual appearance, produced by mist or the strange lights that are sometimes thrown upon particular objects, never fails to present an apparition to the imagination of the solitary and melancholy mountaineer. McLehose. Edinburgh had brought him 'Clarinda', patronage, prominence and prestige, but few good poems and virtually nothingBaderoon explores the traces that people leave in one another’s lives. Here, the speaker looks at an old photograph of her partner taken by his ex-lover and muses about the events that lead to their breakup. On my desk is a photograph of you From actors to poets, Edinburgh has left a lasting impression on many famous visitors (Photo: Jeff J Mitchell / Getty Images) One of the principal figures behind the Scottish Renaissance of the mid-20th century, Hugh MacDiarmid, was an influential poet and writer. Two essays demonstrate the interconnectedness of these interests: ‘A Theory of Scots Letters’ (1923) which MacDiarmid published himself in three successive issues of his journal The Scottish Chapbook and ‘English Ascendancy in British Literature’ (1931) which T.S. Eliot published in The Criterion. In the first, MacDiarmid proposed that the language we call Scots possessed a validity in speech and a unique value in literature in its capacity to draw on the experience of its users in Scotland across generations and geographies, and in its potential in literary modernism. In the second, he compared the status of the literatures written in different languages in the British Isles with the dominance of English-language literature: Gaelic, Welsh, Scots, English (in its distinctive forms in different regions and nations), all possessed unique qualities suppressed by the dominance of English-language literature.

MacCaig's formal education was firmly rooted in the Edinburgh soil: he attended the Royal High School and then Edinburgh University where he studied Classics. He then trained to be a teacher at Moray House in Edinburgh and spent a large part of his life as a primary school teacher. During the war MacCaig refused to fight because he did not want to kill people who he felt were just the same as him. He therefore spent time in various prisons and doing landwork because of his pacifist views. Having spent years educating young children, MacCaig then went on to teach university students when in 1967 he became the first Fellow in Creative Writing at Edinburgh University, and he later held a similar post while teaching at the University of Stirling. Margery Palmer McCulloch, (several chapters) in Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918-1959: literature, national identity and cultural exchange (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009) Robert Garioch, ‘On Scrievin Scots’, Scots Observer (18 February 1933) (reprinted in Lallans 18, Whitsunday 1982) Marco Fazzini, ‘The language of alterity: MacCaig the equilibrist’ in Crossings: essays on contemporary Scottish poetry and hybridity (Venezia Lido: Supernova, 2000) Christopher Whyte, ‘The 1950s’ in Modern Scottish Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004)Fill'd up the symphony between...): "The harp and clairschoes are now only heard of in the Highlands in ancient song. At what period these instruments ceased to be used, is not on record; and tradition is silent on this head. How it happened that the noisy and inharmonious bagpipe banished the soft and expressive harp, we cannot say; but certain it is, that the bagpipe is now the only instrument that obtains universally in the Highland districts." --Campbell's Journey Through North Britain. London, 1808.' His famous quote hints at a less romanticised version of the city, but still gives the literary seal of approval to Auld Reekie. Scott Lyall, Hugh MacDiarmid’s Poetry and Politics of Place: imagining a Scottish republic (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006)