I CAME across a poetry anthology called Poets’ Quair, first published in 1950 for use in Scottish schools. It was edited by David Rintoul and James B Skinner, two English masters at Daniel Stewart’s College in Edinburgh. A seventh impression of the anthology was published as late as 1964.

In their short introduction, Rintoul and Skinner say: “Our aim in producing this anthology is to provide in one book as large and as comprehensive a selection of poetry as can be conveniently studied in the last two or three years of a Scottish secondary school course.” Poets’ Quair begins with 33 pages of Chaucer and marches on through the English literary canon.

However, it also contains the work of 18 Scottish poets, from Robert Henryson and William Dunbar up to William Soutar and Hugh MacDiarmid. All of these 18 poets wrote in the vernacular. Five of them were women. In addition, the anthology also contains ten border ballads.

Rintoul and Skinner go on to say that their selection is in keeping with the recommendations of the Advisory Council on Education in Scotland report that “at every stage of the secondary school there should be included in the scheme of work in English provision ... appropriate examples of Scottish literature” and that “senior pupils should be at least as familiar with Dunbar and Henryson as they are with Chaucer”.

These remarks strike me as a perfect riposte to those middle-class Unionists who denigrate Scots as a kind of vulgar English and who condemn attempts to include it in the curriculum as a nationalist plot. To my knowledge, neither David Rintoul nor James Skinner were Scottish nationalists. Nor were the Advisory Council’s recommendations they followed any kind of plot. Indeed, Poets’ Quair was the kind of bold commitment to our Scottish literary heritage that our own Scottish Parliament could learn much from. It seems a great irony that nationalist cultural policy currently lacks the ambition of two 1950s Daniel Stewart’s schoolmasters, in standing up to what the Wee Ginger Dug referred to as the Scottish “cultural cringe” (Biased Unionist media is the major obstacle to indy, The National, October 11).

Due in part to what I would call Unionist agenda-setting I feel sure that, like many other Scots, I am far more ignorant of my own literary culture than I ought to be. I don’t think I’m wholly to blame for this. It was purely by accident, for example, that I recently stumbled upon a copy of Edwin Morgan’s wonderful translation into Scots of 25 poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky (Wi the haill voice). It was also by accident that I first heard Billy Kay’s CD Auld Reekie, a brilliant recitation of the poetry of Robert Fergusson with accompanying songs and music. Why is it, I asked myself, that this CD of Edinburgh’s greatest poetry is not a teaching aid in its schools? Similarly, a few years ago I was privileged to see John McGrath’s Brechtian play The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil at Edinburgh Playhouse along with about 200 others. It had rarely been shown in public since the early 1970s, if at all. When I tried to buy a copy of it afterwards, I found it was unavailable on DVD. It seems to me scandalous that such a DVD is not in general circulation.

There must be other such examples of which I am unaware. (If your readers know of any I would be grateful to find out about them). Isn’t it time, consequently, that SNP cultural policy took a more robust approach, in the spirit of David Rintoul and James Skinner, to defending and to disseminating knowledge of great Scottish literary works? Maybe Professor Alan Riach, who has written many fine articles in The National on that subject, could act as an adviser.

Alastair Mcleish
Edinburgh