Sangschaw; together with Penny Wheep - 1926

Edinburgh & London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1926. Two octavo volumes. First edition of the Scottish poet Hugh M'Diarmid's first collection of poetry, in the second binding, together with a first edition of his second book. Hugh M'Diarmid, or MacDiarmid, as it is more commonly written, was the pen name of Christopher Murray Grieve. MacDiarmid was the leading light of the Scottish Literary Renaissance that occurred in the first half of the twentieth century. He developed and wrote in a synthetic Scots vernacular that incorporated elements of many regional dialects and integrated archaic words and phrases used by Scotland's late medieval poets. Scots was fading from common and literary use and was most often only used in poetry to evoke a sense of the past; instead, MacDiarmid sought to update and revolutionize the language, making it relevant to the modern era. He also believed that the Scottish psyche could not be expressed in English alone, and as a result, he wanted to create a national voice. Sangschaw contains MacDiarmid's first Scots lyric, The Watergaw, and extensive glossaries follow the poems in both volumes. Both bound in blue cloth, with the original light blue dust wrappers lettered in black. Dust wrappers are toned to spines and margins of the panels, and each has a stray mark to the front panel. Penny Wheep has a short, closed tear to the front panel, else both are in fine condition.