The publication in 1943 of Somhairle MacGill-Eain's book of poems Dàin do Eimhir agus Dàin eile marked a seismic shift in the landscape of 20th-century Scottish Gaelic poetry. Largely a series of love poems addressed to 'Eimhir', the loveliest of the female heroes of Ulster, the poems also address the key forces of fascism and communism and transcend the particular to wrestle with the universal. Many of their images and themes were new to Gaelic poetry.
No-one has summed up the importance of Sorley MacLean's poems better than his fellow Gaelic poet, Iain Crichton Smith: 'A Gaelic poet can stand by a corpse in Africa and in writing about a dead German soldier, he can bring the weight and power of his own tradition to such a poem. One of the weaknesses of Gaelic poetry in the past was the narrowness of the subject matter but this need no longer be the case. Dàin do Eimhir proved once and for all that Gaelic poetry is capable of dealing with subject matters which do not solely belong within its own geographic borders: a Gaelic poet can in fact be mentioned on the same level as the best poets of his time. This is enormously liberating, enormously bracing. And it is what Dàin do Eimhir did.'
Sorley MacLean / Somhairle MacGill-Eain. Songs to Eimhir and other songs / Dàin do Eimhir agus Dàin eile. Glasgow: MacLellan, 1943. Lit.S.36
180mm
