1. Sorley MacLean was a Scottish Gaelic poet, described by the Scottish Poetry Library as "one of the major Scottish poets of the modern era" because of his "mastery of his chosen medium and his engagement with the European poetic tradition and European politics".
Nobel Prize Laureate Seamus Heaney credited MacLean with saving Scottish Gaelic poetry.
Sorley MacLean was raised in a strict Presbyterian family on the island of Raasay, immersed in Gaelic culture and literature from birth, but abandoned religion for socialism.
Sorley MacLean was wounded three times while serving in the Royal Corps of Signals during the North African Campaign.
Sorley MacLean published little after the war, due to his perfectionism.
Sorley MacLean's work was a unique fusion of traditional and modern elements that has been credited with restoring Gaelic tradition to its proper place and reinvigorating and modernizing the Gaelic language.
Sorley MacLean was born in Osgaig, Raasay on 26 October 1911; Scottish Gaelic was his first language.
Sorley MacLean was the second of five sons born to Malcolm and Christina MacLean.
Sorley MacLean's patronymic was Somhairle mac Chaluim 'ic Chaluim 'ic Iain 'ic Tharmaid 'ic Iain 'ic Tharmaid; he could not trace his genealogy with certainty to the eighth generation.
Sorley MacLean's father had been raised on Raasay, but his family was originally from North Uist and, before that, probably Mull.
Sorley MacLean said that 'The most intellectual of my relations was a sceptic and Socialist '.
Sorley MacLean was raised in the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, which he described as "the strictest of Calvinist fundamentalism".
Sorley MacLean later said that he had abandoned religion for socialism at the age of twelve, as he refused to accept that a majority of human beings were consigned to eternal damnation.
Sorley MacLean defended the Free Presbyterian Church against opponents who had little familiarity with it, once describing Free Presbyterian Church elders as "saintly, just saintly men".
Sorley MacLean admired the linguistic and literary sophistication and creativity of Protestant sermons in Gaelic.
Sorley MacLean was educated at Raasay Primary School and Portree Secondary School.
Sorley MacLean was involved in literary circles, played for the university shinty team, and, like many other British intellectuals of the same era, was Pro-Soviet and, while never an official member, he was involved as a "fellow traveller" with the Communist Party of Great Britain.
Sorley MacLean later described an occasion in which he joined a demonstration against Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists.
In January 1938, Sorley MacLean accepted a teaching position at Tobermory High School on the Isle of Mull, where he stayed until December.
Sorley MacLean cultivated friendships with Scottish Renaissance poets, including MacDiarmid, Robert Garioch, Norman MacCaig, Douglas Young, and George Campbell Hay.
Sorley MacLean, a noted historian, published two influential papers on nineteenth-century Gaelic poetry in Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness in 1938 and 1939, which challenged the Celtic Twilight view of Scottish Gaelic literature.
Sorley MacLean accused the "Celtic Twilightists" of "attributing to Gaelic poetry the very opposite of every quality which it actually has", and stated that their claims only succeeded because the Twilightists catered solely to an English-speaking audience.
Sorley MacLean was drafted into the Royal Corps of Signals in September 1940 and was sent overseas to North Africa in December 1941.
Sorley MacLean was wounded in the leg and broke several bones in his feet.
Sorley MacLean wrote a few poems about the war in which he challenged the traditional Gaelic exaltation of heroism, exemplified by the lament for Alasdair of Glengarry; he viewed physical courage as morally neutral, since it was valued by Nazis and used for evil ends.
Sorley MacLean was discharged from Raigmore Hospital in Inverness in August 1943 and released from the army in September.
Sorley MacLean had never been a card carrying member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and the Soviet occupation of Poland after the war caused MacLean to break with his former admiration for the Soviet Union and Stalinism.
Sorley MacLean became particularly close to Sydney Goodsir Smith, who shared a flat with MacLean and his family for more than a year.
In 1947 he was promoted to Principal Teacher of English at Boroughmuir, but Sorley MacLean wanted to return to the western Highlands.
In 1956, Sorley MacLean was offered the position of head teacher of Plockton High School in Wester Ross, not far from where his paternal grandmother's family had lived.
Sorley MacLean felt that this unfair policy discouraged many students from studying Gaelic, although he encouraged his students to take the exam even if they were not native speakers.
Sorley MacLean pointed out that in continental Europe, it was not uncommon to study three or four languages in school.
Sorley MacLean continued to participate in politics, eventually joining the Scottish Labour Party.
Sorley MacLean said that he had burned his poetry instead of publishing it because of his "long years of grinding school-teaching and [his] addiction to an impossible lyric ideal".
Sorley MacLean was writer in residence at the University of Edinburgh from 1973 to 1975, where he reportedly kept an open door and warm welcome for aspiring Gaelic poets.
Sorley MacLean was involved in founding the institution and served on its board.
Sorley MacLean later said, "I was not one who could write poetry if it did not come to me in spite of myself, and if it came, it had to come in Gaelic".
Sorley MacLean's work drew on this "inherited wealth of immemorial generations"; according to MacInnes, few people were as intimately familiar with the entire corpus of Gaelic poetry, written and oral, as Sorley MacLean.
In particular, Sorley MacLean was inspired by the intense love poetry of William Ross, written in the eighteenth century.
Sorley MacLean once said that Scottish Gaelic song-poetry was "the chief artistic glory of the Scots, and of all people of Celtic speech, and one of the greatest artistic glories of Europe".
Sorley MacLean once said that various Communist figures meant more to him than any poet, writing to Douglas Young in 1941 that "Lenin, Stalin and Dimitroff now mean more to me than Prometheus and Shelley did in my teens".
Nevertheless, Sorley MacLean read widely and was influenced by poets from a variety of styles and eras.
In 1940, eight of Sorley MacLean's poems were printed in 17 Poems for 6d, along with Scots poems by Robert Garioch.
Sorley MacLean's work was innovative and influential because it juxtaposed elements from Gaelic history and tradition with icons from mainstream European history.
Sorley MacLean described his poetry as "radiating from Skye and the West Highlands to the whole of Europe".
Sorley MacLean frequently compared the injustice of the Highland Clearances with modern-day issues; in his opinion, the greed of the wealthy and powerful was responsible for many tragedies and social problems.
Sorley MacLean's poetry was not very accessible to Gaelic speakers either, since Dain do Eimhir was not reprinted.
Sorley MacLean was part of the delegation that represented Scotland at the first Cambridge Poetry Festival in 1975, establishing his reputation in England.
Sorley MacLean changed the ordering of the Dain do Eimhir sequence, altering many poems and omitting others.
Sorley MacLean said that he would only consent to publishing the parts of his older work that he found "tolerable".
The critical acclaim and fame that Sorley MacLean achieved was almost entirely from critics who did not understand his poetry in the original Gaelic.
Sorley MacLean would start a reading of a poem by describing the images, then read the poem first in Gaelic and again in English, emphasizing that the translations were not to be read as poems in themselves.
Sorley MacLean's readings were described as deeply moving even by listeners who did not speak Gaelic; according to Seamus Heaney, "MacLean's voice had a certain bardic weirdness that sounded both stricken and enraptured".
Sorley MacLean's poetry was translated into German, and he was invited to poetry readings in Germany and Austria.
Many of Sorley MacLean's relatives were affected, and Hallaig was one of the villages to be depopulated.
Sorley MacLean frequently combined metrical patters and shifted in the middle of a poem, achieving "sensuous effects" that cannot be translated.
Sorley MacLean typically used the traditional vowel rhymes, both internal and end-rhymes, that are ubiquitous in the oral tradition, but a few of his poems have less traditional rhyme schemes.
Sorley MacLean coined very few neologisms; however, he revived or repurposed many obscure or archaic words.
Sorley MacLean often said that he had heard these old words in Presbyterian sermons.
Caimbeul wrote that Sorley MacLean's vocabulary is not "simple", but it is "natural" and arises naturally from everyday speech, although mixed with other influences.
Sorley MacLean emphasized that his "line-by-line translations" were not poetry; of the prose translation of An Cuilthionn that appeared in Dain do Eimhir, he wrote, "my English version has not even the merit of very strict literal accuracy as I find more and more when I look over it".
In June 1987, Sorley MacLean became the first freeman of Skye and Lochalsh.
Sorley MacLean became a Fellow of the Educational Institute of Scotland in 1991, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1992, an honorary fellow of the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland in 1996, and an honorary Royal Scottish Academician the same year.
Sorley MacLean was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992; it has been suggested that he might have won if he had not written in such a marginalized language.
Sorley MacLean is commemorated by a stone in Makars' Court, outside the Writers' Museum, Lawnmarket, Edinburgh, unveiled in 1998 by Iain Crichton Smith.
MacDiarmid and Sorley MacLean influenced each other's work and maintained an extensive correspondence which has been published.
Sorley MacLean said that it is "truly astonishing" that Gaelic, so long minoritized, could have produced a writer like MacLean, who could not express what he had to say in any other language: "Somhairle MacGill-Eain needed Gaelic, and Gaelic needed Somhairle MacGill-Eain".
Poet Aonghas MacNeacail started writing in English, because "My education gave me to believe that Gaelic literature was dead"; he credited Sorley MacLean with convincing him otherwise and inspiring him to write in Gaelic.
The Gaelic rock band Runrig once invited Sorley MacLean to come onstage for a poetry reading.
The poem forms part of the lyrics of Peter Maxwell Davies' opera The Jacobite Rising; and Sorley MacLean's own reading of it in English and in Gaelic was sampled by Martyn Bennett in his album Bothy Culture for a track of the same name.