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This chapter looks at Ian Hamilton Finlay, a figure who can't be excluded from any discussion of how post-Enlightenment thought puts violence and reason back together, apparently separated out in glorious modernity, demonstrating how the tenets of Enlightenment mean that the Scots are still living through cruelty. It notes that Finlay is the only Scottish poet discussed in what is probably the classic explication of American late-modern/early postmodern poetics, Perloff's Radical Artifice. It further notes that this postmodernism, which, as in Morgan, reasserts form sui generis far more than did the final Olsonian phase of modernism, leans on native contexts: Perloff and other American critics have been insightful in arguments asserting the ‘provinciality’ of modernism (as in William Carlos Williams), which are probably most familiar to Scots through Robert Crawford.

The second chapter analyses the emergence of the British concrete poetry movement, surveying the ways in which the poetic ‘object’ was ostensibly pulled in one of two directions: fauvist or suprematist, figurative or abstract, hot or cold, or what was more often described as ‘expressionist’ or ‘constructivist’ modes, mirroring the dialectical tendency of the artistic community in the 1960s. Reviewing the extent to which it became a revolutionary aesthetic movement in poetry, through the lens of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s optical works, kinetic booklets, and ‘constructed abstract situations’, the argument considers the oft-overlooked influence of antecedent modernist models of abstraction as indispensable to concrete poetry and constructed abstract art. Placing pressure on the precise quality of optical effects, the spatial dimensions of the page, and the act of perception, the chapter argues for the concrete project as one galvanized by the vital ontological imperative of language.

The Edinburgh-based poet Ian Hamilton Finlay was both the first publisher of concrete poetry and the first published concrete poet in Britain. But his interaction with the movement was relatively brief, beginning in the spring of 1962 when he discovered the international style through Edwin Morgan, and coming to an end by the late 1960s. Finlay initially seized on concrete poetry as a means of extending the dimensions of poetry beyond linear verse. He utilised concrete poetry’s capacity to combine linguistic and non-linguistic composition to establish or enrich metaphorical links between disparate objects, phenomena, and cultural contexts. This approach, indebted to classical concrete, reflected both his opposition to the restrictions of Scottish literary culture during the 1960s, and a sense of the value of aesthetic order which had ideological and biographical connotations. But his interaction with the concrete movement quickly became fraught, reflecting both the inbuilt constraints of the style and his opposition to its perceived co-option by the sixties counter-culture. Through his production of card and booklet-poems, followed by poems in glass, wood and stone, and finally, three-dimensional poems set in the landscape around his home at Little Sparta, Finlay moved gradually but decisively away from concrete practice.

This chapter tests the development of contemporary theories of the nation and of national identity — such as Benedict Anderson's concept of ‘imagined communities’ — against Scottish experience. It attempts to tend forgotten elements of Scotland's cultural past, and to do so by focusing, in part, on the prominent place of intention in the development of modern Scottish thought, and on the nation as an outcome of intending. It interprets the models of gardening to which Ian Hamilton Finlay's work is connected which were always ‘elsewhere’ — that this was a Scottish garden tended by a ‘Scottish’ gardener, as incidental rather than fundamental; and if, as Finlay insists, ‘Garden sculpture ought to have roots, as garden plants do’, Finlay's own roots must be envisaged as reaching tentacularly beyond Scotland through European culture to classical sources rather than being rooted in Scotland itself.

Chapter 2 examines the formative period in Ian Hamilton Finlay’s career when he encountered the work of like-minded poets in the United States, including Niedecker. Chapter 2 argues that Finlay’s use of folk forms in his poetry during the late 1950s articulates a critical response to the orthodoxies of the ‘Scottish Renaissance’ at that time. Finlay counters what he perceived as the Renaissance’s cultural myopia and literary pretensions by developing a faux-naif folk poetry that consciously evoked the doggerel of the Scottish poet William McGonagall, as well as with an early twentieth-century Russian avant-garde. In doing so, this chapter argues, Finlay strategically situates his work in an international tradition of avant-garde innovation that subverts Renaissance nationalism.

This chapter considers the questions of the local and global that had become more significant in the post-war period, contending that post-war ‘rural’ writers including Nan Shepherd, Neil Gunn, Edwin Muir, and George Mackay Brown, often viewed as peripheral, are actually central and of international relevance, and questioning the supposed division between Scottish rural and urban writing. It observes that the search for ways of encountering and expressing the non-human world through poetry is central to the later work of Hugh MacDiarmid and to the geopoetic practice of Kenneth White, while the poetry and prose of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Iain Crichton Smith, and George Mackay Brown constitute a crucial element of resistance in the face of environmental and cultural degradation.

Chapter 5 considers the ubiquitous presence of pastoral literature and art in the late modernist milieu of The Jargon Society by examining its role and function in the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Thomas A. Clark, and Simon Cutts. Far from perpetuating the common perception of pastoral as an idealistic, nostalgic, or escapist aesthetic mode, Finlay, Clark, and Cutts’s use of pastoral, it is argued, demonstrate a more knowing understanding, and innovative appropriation, of its complex tradition. In particular, it is suggested that pastoral provides these poets the means for reflecting on the materiality of the poem and for articulating the poetics of the printed format that it takes. Furthermore, due to its close links with Epicureanism and its dense weave of intertextual allusion, chapter 5 shows how pastoral presents an insightful analogy for the social dynamics and collaborative vanguard spirit of the remote small press networks that Finlay, Clark, and Cutts have participated in.

Criticism of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets is usually centered on the poem's religious and moral themes—their treatment of time and history and especially of Christian doctrine. This chapter argues that the reason even readers who are not primarily concerned with the poem’s Christian theme so largely admire it is that it is such an amazing poetic construct. It is not a matter of “imitating” musical quartet structure, as many critics argue. Rather, a microreading of the Quartets reveals its astonishing use of sound echo and spatial form.This chapter examines the microstructure of the fourth of the Quartets—"Little Gidding." In analyzing this poem’s sound structure, rhythm, spatial form, and its revisions from earlier versions, the chapter shows what it is that really constitutes the poetic. The verbal genius of "Little Gidding" is examined carefully and the chapter concludes with a postlude, making the case for Four Quartets looking ahead to Concrete Poetry, especially the minimalist lyric of Ian Hamilton Finlay.

This chapter takes the experimental work of Edwin Morgan and shows how he alters the position of the author in a way that can be read as direct criticism of Enlightenment. It suggests, with reference to the poet-critic Edwin Morgan, that the movement toward the rights of citizenship, predicated on some contingent statehood but by no means simply state-happy, is aesthetically linked to the concrete, the tactile, and the ironic. It emphasises that there is a postcolonial context: a critically reworked concrete and poésie trouvée movement, pioneered in Scotland by Edwin Morgan and Ian Hamilton Finlay, can be dated from 1963, immediately after immigration laws made it more difficult to emigrate to the UK from the Caribbean in 1962, and after the last half-decade or so had seen strong immigrant movements, and a concomitant swelling of the loony right.

Chapter 4 explores the vital role that locative media art plays in illuminating tensions associated with contemporary technologically mediated culture, with this art serving as criticism, as an enactment of a subtle political aesthetics. Taking up these themes, this chapter explores three specific projects—Blast Theory’s You Get Me; Josh Begley’s Metadata+ iOS smartphone application; and Julian Oliver’s Border Bumping. These projects have been selected for the ways that they utilize different location technologies; for the critical issues they raise; and, for the opportunities they present for thinking through aesthetics and its relationship to politics.

This last chapter considers the organizational form poetic judgment might take, arguing that in strategic practice it might be productively aligned to forms of the pastoral. In pastoral images there is no completion, and any sense of settlement is always accompanied by the possibility of discord. The chapter revisits the distinction between poetic judgment and practical knowledge associated with phronesis, arguing that it is an acceptance of the disturbance thrown up by experience and skepticism, but a refusal still to let the world decide.