William Soutar (28 April 1898 – 15 October 1943) was a
Scottishpoet and diarist who wrote in English and in
Braid Scots. He is known best for his
epigrams.[1][2]
Life and works
William Soutar was born on 28 April 1898 on South Inch Terrace[3] in
Perth, Scotland, the child of John Soutar (1871–1958), master joiner, and his wife, Margaret Smith (1870–1954), they also had an adopted daughter Evelyn Soutar taken in when Margaret's first cousin died, who wrote poetry. His parents belonged to the
United Free Church of Scotland. He was educated at Southern District School, Perth, and at
Perth Academy, before joining the
wartimeRoyal Navy in 1916. By the time he was demobilized in November 1918, he was suffering from what would be diagnosed in 1924 as
ankylosing spondylitis,[4] a form of chronic inflammatory arthritis.[5]
Soutar began to study medicine at the
University of Edinburgh in 1919, but switched to English. He did not excel academically, but began to contribute to the student magazine. His first volume, Gleanings by an Undergraduate (1923), appeared at his father's expense, as did several others. He began to keep a diary on 18 April 1919. During that period he made contact with
Hugh MacDiarmid, then in
Montrose, and with
Ezra Pound. MacDiarmid at the time was abandoning poetry in English in favour of "synthetic Scots", a literary language compiled from dialects and earlier writers such as
Robert Henryson and
William Dunbar.
Soutar's work correspondingly altered radically, and he became a leading figure of the
Scottish Literary Renaissance, whom posthumous editors would dub "one of the greatest poets Scotland has produced."[6] His family adopted an orphaned cousin of his, seven-year-old Evelyn, in 1927, and this became a spur to him to write also for children. Seeds in the Wind (1933) was a volume of "bairn-rhymes" in Scots.[7]
By 1930 Soutar was bedridden with his disease. He died in 1943 of
tuberculosis contracted in 1929. He is buried in Perth's
Jeanfield and Wellshill Cemetery.[8] His collected poems, edited by MacDiarmid, were published in 1948. His journal, The Diary of a Dying Man, appeared posthumously. One form of verse he used was the
cinquain (now known as American cinquains),[9] which he preferred to call epigrams.[10] Interest in Soutar's work in Scots and English and for adults and children, has revived considerably since the 1980s, although none of his verse was in print for his centenary in 1998.[11] In 2014 he was the subject of a BBC radio programme: The Still Life Poet by
Liz Lochhead.
Erik Chisholm set a range of Soutar's verse, including Summer Song, A Dirge for Summer, and the humorous settings The Prodigy, The Braw Plum and The Three Worthies.[13]
James MacMillan set several of his Scots-language poems in a style that drew on traditional folk song:[14] "Scots Song" (aka 'The Tryst', 1991), "Ballad" (1994) and "The Children" (1995) were collected as Three Scottish Songs in 1995.[15]
The album In a Sma' Room, with settings by Debra Salem, Kevin Mackenzie and Paul Harrison, appeared in 2021.[16][17]
Selected published works
Gleanings by an Undergraduate (Paisley: Alexander Gardner, 1923)
Brief Words. One Hundred Epigrams (Edinburgh/London: The Moray Press, 1935)
Seeds in the Wind, Poems in Scots for Children (London: Andrew Dakers, 1943)
Diaries of a Dying Man (Edinburgh: Canongate Press, 1954)
ISBN0-86241-347-8. In fact only a short selection
The Collected Poems of William Soutar, ed. Hugh MacDiarmid (London: Andrew Dakers, 1948)
Poems of William Soutar: a New Selection, ed. W. R. Aitken (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1988)
ISBN0707305543
The Diary of a Dying Man (Edinburgh: Chapman, 1991)
ISBN0906772311
At the Year's Fa': Selected Poems in Scots and English (Perth: Perth & Kinross Libraries, 2001)
ISBN0905452356
^Carl Mac Dougall & Douglas Gifford: Introduction: Into a Room: Selected Poems of William Soutar (Perth and Kinross Libraries, Perth, 2000).
ISBN1902831225.