About William Soutar

William Soutar (1898-1943) was one of the major writers of the 20th-Century Scottish Literary Renaissance. Particularly known for his 'bairn rhymes', he is perhaps the finest modern poet in Scots after MacDiarmid.

Biography

William Soutar was born in Perth where he attended the Southern District School (1903-12) and Perth Academy (1912-16). He joined the Royal Navy in 1916 and served for two years with the North Atlantic Fleet. By the time he was demobilized in November 1918, he was also already suffering from a crippling inflammatory condition, which would eventually be diagnosed as anklyosing spondylitis. Soutar enrolled at Edinburgh University, initially to study medicine, but soon transferring to English Literature. His condition worsened during his university years, and, on graduating in 1923, Soutar realized that he would be unable to pursue a career in journalism as he had wished. Instead, he began teacher training in 1924 but had to return to Perth to undergo medical treatment for his now diagnosed condition. His condition steadily worsened and Soutar remained in Perth under his parent’s care. From 1930 to the end of his life he was bed-ridden. Soutar nonetheless wrote and read voraciously, and entertained a stream of visitors, including major literary figures such as Hugh MacDiarmid, Helen Cruickshank, George Bruce, Tom Scott, and William Montgomerie. His bedroom has been described as one of the centres of the Scottish Literary Renaissance. By the outbreak of the Second World War, Soutar was increasingly weakened by tuberculosis. Reduced to almost complete paralysis, but still able to record his Diary of a Dying Man, Soutar died on 15 October 1943.

Soutar the Poet

Soutar wrote poetry from childhood onwards, publishing in his school magazine The Young Barbarian and the Edinburgh University magazine The Student. His first volume Gleanings by an Undergraduate appeared in 1923. In the 1920s, Soutar made contact with Hugh MacDiarmid (then a journalist in Montrose) and Ezra Pound. These encounters served to crystalize his frustration with the fashionable poetry of his day. He turned increasingly to writing in Scots (though never entirely abandoning English), sharing MacDiarmid’s aim to revitalize the Scottish literary tradition via European Modernist influences. He employed, however, a more vernacular idiom than the ‘synthetic Scots’ forged by MacDiarmid, and increasingly came to feel that Scots could survive only by drawing on the ballad tradition. He also excelled in ‘bairn rhymes’, children’s verses in Scots written for an orphaned Australian cousin, Evelyn, whom his parents had adopted. He collected these in the volume Seeds in the Wind (1933) which he hoped would be used by Scottish schools to keep the language alive. Soutar published eight further volumes of poetry in Scots and English between 1923 and 1943. These increasingly reflected a passionate Socialist pacifism, initially inspired by Soutar’s First World War experiences but thrown into heightened focus by the Spanish Civil War.

Soutar the Diarist

Soutar is one of Scotland’s great diarists. He began keeping a diary in 1919 and made daily entries throughout the days of his illness, as well as keeping separate journals for philosophical mediations, ‘dream books’, and commonplace books for noting humorous everyday events. From July 1943 onwards, he documented his last months in Diary of a Dying Man, one of the major works of 20th-century Scottish prose.

Recognition

Hugh MacDiarmid edited Soutar’s Collected Poems in 1948 but controversially omitted many of his finest poems. Further anthologies were compiled by W. R. Aitken in 1961 (Poems in Scots and English) and 1988 (Poems of William Soutar: A New Selection), but no complete edition has yet appeared. Soutar was the subject of a biography, Still Life, by Alexander Scott in 1958 and of a television film, The Garden Beyond, by Douglas Eadie in 1977. In 1987, BBC Radio Scotland broadcast a selection from his Diaries of a Dying Man, which were published as a Canongate Classic in the following year. Soutar’s father bequeathed his house ‘Inglelowe’ to Perth Town Council with the condition that Soutar’s room be preserved and open to public view. Now known as the Soutar House, it is the base for a writer-in-residence, and is used for readings and community events. The Friends of William Soutar Society was founded in 2007 to promote his works.

Further Reading

• George Bruce, William Soutar, 1898-1943: The Man and the Poet: An Essay (Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland, 1978)
• Heidelinde Prüger, Journey without Ending: The Journals of William Soutar (Salzburg: Poetry Salzburg, 2001)
• Heidelinde Prüger, The Righteousness of Life: William Soutar, a Poet’s Scottish Predilection for Philosophy (Frankfurt am Main; New York: Peter Lang, c1998)
• Alexander Scott, Still Life: William Soutar, 1898-1943 (Edinburgh: Chambers, 1958)