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.

I believe that is because he had been teaching these kids at Tynecastle, it was 1917 and he could see the way the war was going. These boys were the fallen generation. This famous line is taken from the epic poem Marmion. Scott, who was born in College Wynd on the Cowgate, is one of the most significant figures in Scottish literature and the Scott Monument is the largest monument to a writer in the world.Poems for 6d: In Gaelic, Lowland Scots and English (with Somhairle MacGhill-Eathain) (Edinburgh: Chalmers Press, 1940) His long absence from Scotland meant that Graham was often overlooked in accounts of Scottish writing, although he corresponded with Ian Hamilton Finlay and Edwin Morgan, among others, and remained friendly towards Hugh MacDiarmid while their positions as regards to poetic language were very different. He wrote to William Montgomerie in 1969: My dear Sir, do not think that I blaspheme when I tell you that your great London, as compared to Dun-Edin, ‘mine own romantic town’, is as prose compared to poetry, or as a great rumbling, rambling, heavy Epic compared to a Lyric, brief, bright, clear, and vital as a flash of lightning.” 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.

Stevenson’s Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes, from which this quote is taken, is full of beautiful descriptions of Auld Reekie.Ann Edwards Boutelle, Thistle and Rose: a study of Hugh MacDiarmid’s poetry (Loanhead: Macdonald Publishers, 1980)

Garioch had met Sorley MacLean at Edinburgh University, and poems by both appear in 17 Poems for 6d, published by Garioch (as the Chalmers Press) in early 1940. It wasn’t until 1966 that the Selected Poems appeared, followed by the Collected Poems of 1977, (both published by Macdonald). Robin Fulton updated and revised the latter as Complete Poetical Works in 1983, and also edited a new Collected Poems in 2004. Scott Lyall and Margery Palmer McCulloch (eds), The Edinburgh Companion to Hugh MacDiarmid (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011) Having left Edinburgh the day before, the Bard was, on February 19, 1788, at last about to settle down with Jean Armour. As The boys sent gifts - a bottle of whisky and cigarettes for him. There is an obvious connection and he clearly built up a strong rapport.”Their shadows o'er Clan-Alpine's grave...........): Inch-Cailliach, the Isle of Nuns, or of Old Women, is a most beautiful island at the lower extremity of Loch-Lomond. The church belonging to the former nunnery was long used as the place of worship for the parish of Buchanan, but scarcely any vestiges of it now remain. The burial ground continues to be used, and contains the family places of sepulture of several neighbouring clans. The monuments of the lairds of MacGregor, and of other families, claiming a descent from the old Scottish King Alpine, are most remarkable. Of Ferragus or Ascabart.....): These two sons of Anak flourished in romantic fable. The first is well known to the admirers of Ariosto, by the name of Ferrau. Ascapart, or Ascabart, makes a very material figure in the History of Bevis of Hampton, by whom he was conquered. His vision was deepening. What of the strategy and tactics? His newspaper job was a breadwinner but also taught him tactics. He wrote the poems, but also articles, essays, polemical and analytical cultural, literary and political journalism, publishing in general newspapers and specialised periodicals throughout Scotland, in London (especially in the highbrow New Age, alongside Pound and other luminaries of modernity) and occasionally in America. He edited anthologies of poetry, Northern Numbers, three collections representing the old guard alongside the hard-headed younger generation, with the third book publishing poems by ten men and ten women: positive discrimination indeed. He edited his own periodicals and magazines: The Scottish Chapbook, The Scottish Nation, others, and contributed to many more. The strategy was to get the ideas out into circulation as widely as possible, to stir things up, not to let the dead hand of the establishment reassert its authority. Douglas Dunn, ‘Cantraips and trauchles: Robert Garioch and Scottish poetry’, Cencrastus Hugh MacDiarmid Memorial Lecture, Cencrastus No. 43, (Autumn 1992) How does it feel when the person you love the most is already gone? Nordbrandt creates an accurate representation about the grief that follows a loved one’s death. You are gone.

The Revolutionary Art of the Future: rediscovered poems, edited by John Manson, Dorian Grieve and Alan Riach (Manchester: Carcanet, 2003)In this poem, Neruda laments the inevitability of death and mankind’s helplessness in confronting it. There is fear in the unknown and a fascination with what comes after death. There are cemeteries that are lonely, Dark poetry is the use of negative themes in poetic form. It is not about style or structure but the content of a poem. The subjects it depicts can range from merely melancholic to extremely horrific. Alan Riach, ‘Norman MacCaig: the poetry of experience’ in Marco Fazzini (ed.), Alba Literaria: a history of Scottish literature (Venezia Mestre: Amos Edizioni, 2005) The new book includes a previously unpublished fragment of a poem written by Owen, found in his editor’s notes for an edition of The Hydra and a fragment that Owen left in an autograph book.