Hidden Sun: The Poetry of Joseph Macleod (1903 – 1984)
BY JAMES FOUNTAIN
Waterloo Press, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-915241-01-6
https://waterloopress.co.uk/books/joseph-macleod/
Hidden Sun is the first ever complete critical volume on the work of neglected British poet Joseph Macleod.
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Macleod was a vital British modernist poet in the same circles as Basil Bunting and Ezra Pound who became famous behind the microphone at the BBC as WW2 wartime newsreader. Bunting thought Macleod's The Ecliptic, published by TS Eliot at Faber in 1930 at Ezra Pound’s insistence, was the greatest poem since The Wasteland. Macleod wrote many other volumes of poetry as well as several books on Soviet theatre history. His best friends were Graham Greene, Adrian Stokes, Compton Mackenzie, Aldous Huxley and WS Graham. He corresponded with Pound for 40 years.
James Fountain explores the development of Macleod's poetic style from his high modernist long poem, The Ecliptic (1930), through to the five books of poetry written under the pseudonym ‘Adam Drinan’; significant critical chapters by Andrew Duncan complete the text.
James Fountain’s fine monograph about Joseph Macleod is welcome news to admirers of Macleod’s poetry, which includes not only the fascinating modernist long poem The Ecliptic but the very different and better-known poems he published as Adam Drinan. Macleod’s poetry deserves more readers, and this book should help his work find them. --Keith Tuma, Miami University
James Fountain (and Andrew Duncan) explore why such a gifted poet has almost vanished from the story of British Modernism, and confidently reclaim his place. Based on original archival research, this book opens a new and exciting vista on a gifted poet and his troubled times. --James McGonigal, University of Glasgow
…this excellent account of Macleod should place him back into the public arena as a key modernist voice… James Fountain brings this forgotten voice alive, and offers us the chance to take up the challenge as the 21st century readership this poet so deserves. --Adam Piette, University of Sheffield
James Fountain (and Andrew Duncan) offer here an admirably lucid and companionable commentary on his works, drawing out the extraordinarily diverse elements that constituted his singular voice: by turns mythical, modernist, anthropological, socialist, populist, Scots. A poet who was regarded by writers as various as Ezra Pound, Graham Greene, and W.S. Graham is here handsomely recovered for a modern readership. --Seamus Perry, Balliol College, Oxford
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