Joseph Todd Gordon Macleod (1903–1984) was a British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 poet, actor, playwright, theatre director, theatre historian and BBC

BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

 Newsreader. He also published poetry under the pseudonym

Pseudonym

A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...

 Adam Drinan.

Biography

Joseph Macleod was the son of Scottish parents, and was educated at Rugby School

Rugby School

Rugby School is a co-educational day and boarding school located in the town of Rugby, Warwickshire, England. It is one of the oldest independent schools in Britain.-History:...

 and Balliol College, Oxford. He passed his Bar examination

Bar examination

A bar examination is an examination conducted at regular intervals to determine whether a candidate is qualified to practice law in a given jurisdiction.-Brazil:...

s, though never practiced as a barrister

Barrister

A barrister is a member of one of the two classes of lawyer found in many common law jurisdictions with split legal professions. Barristers specialise in courtroom advocacy, drafting legal pleadings and giving expert legal opinions...

, preferring a career as an actor, and also had aspirations as a poet. At Rugby School he was close friends with Adrian Stokes

Adrian Stokes (critic)

Adrian Stokes was a British writer and painter, known principally as an influential art critic. He was also a published poet.- Background :...

, and at Oxford he became close friends with Graham Greene

Graham Greene

Henry Graham Greene, OM, CH was an English author, playwright and literary critic. His works explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world...

.

From 1927, he was an actor and producer at the experimental Cambridge Festival Theatre. In 1933 he became the theatre's director and lessee. Five of his own plays were staged there, including Overture to Cambridge (1933) and A Woman Turned to Stone (1934). Under Macleod, the theatre became famous throughout Europe for its avante garde productions, and staging of lesser known works by great playwrights. Macleod staged some of Ezra Pound's Noh plays, and also some Ibsen, Chekhov (his company, The Cambridge Festival Players, was one of the first in the UK to stage Chekhov's play The Seagull) The theatre was forced to close due to financial difficulties in June 1935, and has remained so ever since. He was intermittently involved in theatre production after this, and in 1952 won the Arts Council Silver Medal for his play Leap in September.

In 1930, Macleod had his first book of poetry published, The Ecliptic, a highly complex book of verse divided into the signs of the zodiac, which was helped through to publication at Faber and Faber

Faber and Faber

Faber and Faber Limited, often abbreviated to Faber, is an independent publishing house in the UK, notable in particular for publishing a great deal of poetry and for its former editor T. S. Eliot. Faber has a rich tradition of publishing a wide range of fiction, non fiction, drama, film and music...

 through a recommendation from Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

, who thought highly of Macleod's abilities as a poet. A long-running correspondence was thus begun between the two poets. Macleod's first book was published alongside W. H. Auden

W. H. Auden

Wystan Hugh Auden , who published as W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet,The first definition of "Anglo-American" in the OED is: "Of, belonging to, or involving both England and America." See also the definition "English in origin or birth, American by settlement or citizenship" in See also...

's first book, Poems, and the Poetry (Chicago) editor Morton Dauwen Zabel hailed these two poets as "a Dawn in Britain" in his editorial. However, Macleod's next book, Foray of Centaurs, was considered "too Greek" for publication by Faber and Faber, and although this gained publication in Paris and Chicago, it was never to be published in the UK during Macleod's lifetime. Basil Bunting

Basil Bunting

Basil Cheesman Bunting was a significant British modernist poet whose reputation was established with the publication of Briggflatts in 1966. He had a lifelong interest in music that led him to emphasise the sonic qualities of poetry, particularly the importance of reading poetry aloud...

 was an admirer of this early poetry, and claimed Macleod was the most important living British poet in his 'British' edition of Poetry (Chicago).mm

Placing his energies into the theatre, Macleod became director of the highly experimental Cambridge Festival Theatre in 1933 and remained so until 1936. In 1937 he became secretary of Huntingdonshire Divisional Labour Party

Labour Party (UK)

The Labour Party is a centre-left democratic socialist party in the United Kingdom. It surpassed the Liberal Party in general elections during the early 1920s, forming minority governments under Ramsay MacDonald in 1924 and 1929-1931. The party was in a wartime coalition from 1940 to 1945, after...

 and stood as a Parliamentary Candidate, but failed to gain election.

In 1938, Macleod became an announcer and newsreader at the BBC, where he began to write and publish poetry under the pseudonym "Adam Drinan". These poems dealt with the Highland clearances

Highland Clearances

The Highland Clearances were forced displacements of the population of the Scottish Highlands during the 18th and 19th centuries. They led to mass emigration to the sea coast, the Scottish Lowlands, and the North American colonies...

, and described the Scottish landscape in rich detail, using Gaelic assonances. He was one of the first to succeed in rendering the qualities of Gaelic poetry in English. These poems and verse plays won praise from many Scottish writers - Naomi Mitchison

Naomi Mitchison

Naomi May Margaret Mitchison, CBE was a Scottish novelist and poet. She was appointed CBE in 1981; she was also entitled to call herself Lady Mitchison, CBE since 5 October 1964 .- Childhood and family background :Naomi Margaret Haldane was...

, Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig was a Scottish poet. His poetry, in modern English, is known for its humour, simplicity of language and great popularity.-Life:...

, Edwin Muir

Edwin Muir

Edwin Muir was an Orcadian poet, novelist and translator born on a farm in Deerness on the Orkney Islands. He was remembered for his deeply felt and vivid poetry in plain language with few stylistic preoccupations....

, Compton Mackenzie

Compton Mackenzie

Sir Compton Mackenzie, OBE was a writer and a Scottish nationalist.-Background:Compton Mackenzie was born in West Hartlepool, England, into a theatrical family of Mackenzies, but many of whose members used Compton as their stage surname, starting with his grandfather Henry Compton, a well-known...

, George Bruce, Sydney Goodsir Smith

Sydney Goodsir Smith

Sydney Goodsir Smith was a Scottish poet, artist, dramatist and novelist. He wrote poetry in literary Scots often referred to as Lallans, and was a major figure of the Scottish Renaissance....

, Maurice Lindsay

Maurice Lindsay

Maurice Lindsay CBE was a Scottish broadcaster, writer and poet. He was born in Glasgow.After serving in World War II he became a radio broadcaster, also editing the 1946 anthology Modern Scottish Poetry, and writing music criticism. He later was Programme Controller at Border Television.His...

, and many more. Macleod's "Drinan" poetry was in much demand in both England and Scotland, as well as Ireland and the US. Editors such as Tambimuttu (of Poetry (London)), Maurice Lindsay (Poetry (Scotland)) and John Lehmann

John Lehmann

Rudolf John Frederick Lehmann was an English poet and man of letters, and one of the foremost literary editors of the twentieth century, founding the periodicals New Writing and The London Magazine.The fourth child of journalist Rudolph Lehmann, and brother of Helen Lehmann, novelist Rosamond...

 (Hogarth Press and New Writing), all requested and published large amounts of his poems in the 1940s. Both "Drinan" and Macleod are included in Kenneth Rexroth

Kenneth Rexroth

Kenneth Rexroth was an American poet, translator and critical essayist. He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement...

's New British Poets anthology (1949), published for New Directions. The "Drinan" pseudonym was not publicly revealed until 1953, and which Hugh MacDiarmid commented was "so long one of the best kept secrets of the contemporary literary world" Adrian Stokes received and dealt with Macleod's 'Drinan' correspondence.

Macleod moved to Florence

Florence

Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....

 in 1955, where he lived until his death in 1984.His work was recently re-discovered in the late 1990s, and Cyclic Serial Zeiths From the Flux: The Selected Poems of Joseph Macleod, edited and with an introduction by Andrew Duncan

Andrew Duncan

Sir Andrew Rae Duncan, GBE was a British businessman who was brought into government during the Second World War, serving twice as both President of the Board of Trade and Minister of Supply....

, was published by Waterloo Press in 2008. Copies are available to order online at http://www.waterloopress.co.uk priced £9.00 each.

Poem

From ‘Cancer, or, The Crab’, a section of The Ecliptic (London: Faber and Faber, 1930)

Moonpoison, mullock of sacrifice,

Suffuses the veins of the eyes

Till the retina, mooncoloured,

Sees the sideways motion of the cretin crab

Hued thus like a tortoise askew in the glaucous moonscape

A flat hot boulder it

Lividly in the midst of the Doldrums

Sidles

The lunatic unable to bear the silent course of constellations

Mad and stark naked

Sidles

The obol on an eyeball of a man dead from elephantiasis

Sidles

All three across heaven with a rocking motion.

The Doldrums: ‘region of calms and light baffling winds

near Equator.’

But the calms are rare

The winds baffling but not light

And the drunken boats belonging to the Crab Club

Rock hot and naked to the dunning of the moon

All in the pallescent Saragosso weed

And windbound, seeking distraction by the light of deliverance

For

What are we but the excrement of the non-existent noon?

(Truth like starlight crookedly)

What are we all but ‘burial grounds abhorred by the moon’?

And did the Maoris die of measles? So do we.

But there is no snow here, nor lilies.

The night is glutinous

In a broad hearth crisscross thorn clumps

Smoulder: distant fireback of copse

Throws back silence: glassen ashes gleam in pond

The constellations which have stopped working (?)

Shimmer. No dead leaf jumps.

On edge of a glowworm

Hangs out its state-recognized torchlamp

Blocks of flowers gape dumb as windows with blinds drawn

And in the centre the rugate trees

Though seeming as if they go up in smoke

Are held like cardboard where they are.

Bluehot it is queer fuel to make the moon move.

[...]

We trap our goldfinch trapping our souls therewinged

Sacrifice our mad gods to the madder gods:

We hymn the two sons of Leda and Zeus Aegis-bearer

We don’t. We drink and drivel. My

poor Catullus, do stop being such a

Fool. Admit that lost which as you watch is

gone. O, once the days shone very bright for

you, when where that girl you loved so (as no

other will be) called, you came and came. And

then there were odd things done and many

which you wanted and she didn’t not want.

Yes indeed the days shone very bright for

you. But now she doesn’t want it.

Don’t you either,

booby. Don’t keep chasing her. Don’t live in

misery, carry on, be firm, be hardened.

Goodbye girl: Catullus is quite hardened,

doesn’t want you, doesn’t ask, if you’re not

keen – though sorry you’ll be to be not asked.

Yes, poor sinner . . . what is left in life for

you? Who’ll now go with you? Who’ll be attracted?

Whom’ll you love now? Whom may you belong to?

Whom’ll you now kiss? Whose lips’ll you nibble?

- Now you, Catullus, you’ve decided to be hardened.

How can I be hardened when the whole world is fluid?

O Aphrodite Pandemos, your badgers rolling in the moonlit corn

Corn blue-bloom-covered carpeting the wind

Wind humming like distant rooks

Distant rooks busy like factory whirring metal

Whirring metallic starlings bizarre like cogwheels missing teeth

These last grinning like the backs of old motor cars

Old motor cars smelling of tragomaschality

Tragomaschality denoting the triumph of self over civilization

Civilization being relative our to Greek

Greek to Persian

Persian to Chinese

Chinese politely making borborygms to show satisfaction

Satisfaction a matter of capacity

Capacity not significance: otherwise with an epigram

Epigrams – poems with a strabismus

Strabismus being as common spiritually as optically the moon

The moon tramping regular steps like a policeman past the

houses of the Zodiac

And the Zodiac itself, whirling and flaming sideways

Circling from no point returning to no point

Endlessly skidding as long as man skids, though never moving,

Wavers, topples, dissolves like a sandcastle into acidity.

Is there nothing more soluble, more gaseous, more imperceptible?

Nothing.

Riddle-me-ree from An Old Olive Tree (Edinburgh: M. MacDonald, 1971)

I was afraid and they gave me guts.

I was alone and they made me love.

Round that wild heat they built a furnace

and in the torment smelted me.

Out of my fragments came design:

I was assembled. I moved, I worked,

I grew receptive. Thanks to them

I have fashioned me.

Who am I?

Poetry

• The Ecliptic (Faber and Faber, 1930)
• Foray of Centaurs (Sections published in This Quarter, Paris, 1931, The Criterion, 1931, and Poetry (Chicago), 1932)
• The Cove (French & Sons, 1940)
• The Men of the Rocks (Fortune Press, 1942)
• The Ghosts of the Strath (Fortune Press, 1943)
• Women of the Happy Island (MacLellan & Co., 1944)
• The Passage of the Torch: A Heroical-Historical Lay for the Fifth Centenary of the Founding of Glasgow University (Oliver and Boyd, 1951)
• Script From Norway (MacLellan & Co., 1953)
• An Old Olive Tree (M. Macdonald, 1971)

Literary Criticism

• Beauty and the Beast (Chatto and Windus, 1927; Viking Press (USA), 1928; Haskell House (USA), 1974)

Theatre History

• The New Soviet Theatre (Allen & Unwin, 1943)
• Actors Cross the Volga (Allen & Unwin, 1946)
• A Soviet Theatre Sketchbook (Allen & Unwin, 1951)
• Piccola Storia del Teatro Britannico (Sansoni (Florence), 1958. Reissued 1963)
• The Sisters d'Aranyi (Allen & Unwin, 1969)
• The Actor's Right to Act (Allen & Unwin, 1981)

External links

• Link to official Joseph Macleod website.