Corey Gibson – författare

Examining Hamish Henderson’s search for the radical voice of the people in modern ScotlandHow might the alienation of the artist in modern Scotland be overcome? How do you incite a popular folk revival? Can a poet truly speak with the ‘voice of the people’? And what happens to the writer who rejects print culture in favour of becoming Anon.? The life and times of polymath, scholar, author and folk-hero, Hamish Henderson (1919-2002), poses, and helps us to answer, these questions. This book examines his life-long commitment to finding a form of artistic expression suitable for post-war Europe. Though Henderson is a major figure in Scottish cultural history, his reputation is largely maintained through anecdotes and radical folk songs. This study explores his ideas in their intellectual, cultural and political contexts. It describes how all of his works – in war poetry, song collection, folklore scholarship, folksong revivalism, literary translation, and vicious public debates – reflect this desire to see the artist fully reintegrated in society.Key Features:Reclaims Hamish Henderson from the marginalia of Scottish literary historyProvides a hitherto unexplored perspective on twentieth-century Scottish cultural historySituates Scottish literary and cultural debates in the broader context of intellectual and cultural developments in twentieth-century Europe and the USDirectly tackles the question of national identity in twentieth-century Scotland

How might the alienation of the artist in modern Scotland be overcome? How do you incite a popular folk revival? Can a poet truly speak with the Voice of the people'? And what happens to the writer who rejects print culture in favour of becoming Anon? The life and times of polymath, scholar, author and folk- hero, Hamish Henderson (1919-2002), poses, and helps us to answer, these questions. This book examines his life-long commitment to finding a form of artistic expression suitable for post-war Europe. Though Henderson is a major figure in Scottish cultural history, his reputation is largely maintained through anecdotes and radical folk songs. This study explores his ideas in their intellectual, cultural and political contexts. It describes how all of his works - in war poetry, song collection, folklore scholarship, folksong revivalism, literary translation, and vicious public debates - reflect this desire to see the artist fully reintegrated in society.

Hailed by some as the most important Scottish poet since Burns, Hamish Henderson lived an epic life against the backdrop of some of the defining social, political and cultural battles – both national and international – of the twentieth century. A soldier, academic, folklorist, political activist, songwriter, translator and poet, he was a seminal figure in the Scottish folk revival and literary renaissance. His humanist legacy lives on in all of these spheres, but it is perhaps through his poetry that we may experience, most keenly, the ‘method in his magic.’ In every verse and lyric we catch glimpses of a brilliant, complex and highly original mind, whilst also developing a fuller understanding of Henderson’s lifelong mission to ‘make poetry become people.’Published to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Hamish Henderson, this collected poems is the first since the poet’s death and makes available, for the first time, new material from the archive. The book opens with Freedom Becomes People, first published in Chapman 42, and reproduces, in full, his Ballads of World War II and Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica. This volume pushes at the boundaries between high modernist poetics and popular folk song; between the profound and profane; between works of individual and collective endeavour and between the poet and his purpose.