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Joseph Todd Gordon Macleod (1903–1984) was a British poet, actor, playwright, theatre director, theatre historian and
newsreader. He also published poetry under the pseudonym Adam Drinan.
Joseph Todd Gordon Macleod
– with audio recordings
Joseph Macleod Collection at the University of Stirling Archives
{{DEFAULTSORT:Macleod, Joseph BBC newsreaders and journalists 1903 births 1984 deaths Scottish dramatists and playwrights 20th-century British poets 20th-century British dramatists and playwrights British male poets British male dramatists and playwrights 20th-century British male writers Scottish Renaissance
Joseph Todd Gordon Macleod (1903–1984) was a British poet, actor, playwright, theatre director, theatre historian and BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC
Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...
...Biography
Macleod was the son of Scottish parents, and was educated atRugby School
Rugby School is a public school (English independent boarding school for pupils aged 13–18) in Rugby, Warwickshire, England.
Founded in 1567 as a free grammar school for local boys, it is one of the oldest independent schools in Britain. ...
and Balliol College
Balliol College () is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. One of Oxford's oldest colleges, it was founded around 1263 by John I de Balliol, a landowner from Barnard Castle in County Durham, who provided the ...
, Oxford. He passed his bar examination
A bar examination is an examination administered by the bar association of a jurisdiction that a lawyer must pass in order to be admitted to the bar of that jurisdiction.
Australia
Administering bar exams is the responsibility of the bar associ ...
s, though never practised as a barrister, preferring a career as an actor, and also had aspirations as a poet. At Rugby he was a close friend of Adrian Stokes, and at Oxford he became a close friend of Graham Greene
Henry Graham Greene (2 October 1904 – 3 April 1991) was an English writer and journalist regarded by many as one of the leading English novelists of the 20th century. Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquir ...
.
From 1927, he was an actor and producer at the experimental Cambridge Festival Theatre
The Theatre Royal was built in the Barnwell suburb of Cambridge, England, in 1816. It closed later that century but reopened as the Cambridge Festival Theatre from 1926 until 1935. The building, in which part of the interior of the theatre surv ...
. 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 avant-garde productions, and staging of lesser known works by great playwrights. Macleod staged some of Ezra Pound's Noh plays, and also some Ibsen and Chekhov
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (; 29 January 1860 Old Style date 17 January. – 15 July 1904 Old Style date 2 July.) was a Russian playwright and short-story writer who is considered to be one of the greatest writers of all time. His career ...
(his company, The Cambridge Festival Players, was one of the first in the UK to stage Chekhov's play ''The Seagull
''The Seagull'' ( rus, Ча́йка, r=Cháyka, links=no) is a play by Russian dramatist Anton Chekhov, written in 1895 and first produced in 1896. ''The Seagull'' is generally considered to be the first of his four major plays. It dramatises th ...
''). 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''.
''The Ecliptic'', Macleod's first book of poetry – a complex book divided into the signs of the zodiac – was published in 1930. It was approved for publication by T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber after a strong recommendation from Ezra Pound, 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
Wystan Hugh Auden (; 21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973) was a British-American poet. Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in ...
's first book, ''Poems'', and the '' Poetry (Chicago)'' editor Morton Dauwen Zabel hailed these two poets as "a Dawn in Britain" in his editorial.K. Tuma. (1998) ''Fishing By Obstinate Isles''. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, pp. 124-125. 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 his lifetime. Basil Bunting
Basil Cheesman Bunting (1 March 1900 – 17 April 1985) was a British modernist poet whose reputation was established with the publication of '' Briggflatts'' in 1966, generally regarded as one of the major achievements of the modernist traditio ...
was an admirer of this early poetry, and claimed Macleod was the most important living British poet in his 'British' edition of ''Poetry (Chicago)''.
In 1937 Macleod became secretary of Huntingdonshire
Huntingdonshire (; abbreviated Hunts) is a non-metropolitan district of Cambridgeshire and a historic county of England. The district council is based in Huntingdon. Other towns include St Ives, Godmanchester, St Neots and Ramsey. The popu ...
Divisional Labour Party and stood as a parliamentary candidate, but failed to gain election.
In 1938, Macleod became an announcer and newsreader at the BBC, and he began to write and publish poetry under the pseudonym "Adam Drinan". These poems dealt with the Highland clearances, 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, Norman MacCaig, Edwin Muir
Edwin Muir CBE (15 May 1887 – 3 January 1959) was a Scottish poet, novelist and translator. Born on a farm in Deerness, a parish of Orkney, Scotland, he is remembered for his deeply felt and vivid poetry written in plain language and w ...
, Compton Mackenzie
Sir Edward Montague Compton Mackenzie, (17 January 1883 – 30 November 1972) was a Scottish writer of fiction, biography, histories and a memoir, as well as a cultural commentator, raconteur and lifelong Scottish nationalist. He was one of th ...
, George Bruce, Sydney Goodsir Smith
Sydney Goodsir Smith (26 October 1915 – 15 January 1975) was a New Zealand-born Scottish poet, artist, dramatist and novelist. He wrote poetry in literary Scots often referred to as Lallans (Lowlands dialect), and was a major figure of the S ...
, Maurice Lindsay, 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
Rudolf John Frederick Lehmann (2 June 1907 – 7 April 1987) was an English poet and man of letters. He founded the periodicals ''New Writing'' and '' The London Magazine'', and the publishing house of John Lehmann Limited.
Biography
Born i ...
(Hogarth Press and New Writing), all requested and published many of his poems in the 1940s. Both "Drinan" and Macleod are included in Kenneth Rexroth's ''New British Poets'' anthology (1949), published for New Directions. The "Drinan" pseudonym was not publicly revealed until 1953, after which Hugh MacDiarmid
Christopher Murray Grieve (11 August 1892 – 9 September 1978), best known by his pen name Hugh MacDiarmid (), was a Scottish poet, journalist, essayist and political figure. He is considered one of the principal forces behind the Scottish Rena ...
commented it was "so long one of the best-kept secrets of the contemporary literary world".Hugh MacDiarmid. From 'The Poetry of Joseph Macleod' in ''The Raucle Tongue: Hitherto Uncollected Prose, Volume III'', Eds. Angus Calder, Glen Murray and Alan Riach. Manchester: Carcanet Press, p. 312. Adrian Stokes received and dealt with Macleod's 'Drinan' correspondence.
Macleod moved to Florence
Florence ( ; it, Firenze ) is a city in Central Italy and the capital city of the Tuscany Regions of Italy, region. It is the most populated city in Tuscany, with 383,083 inhabitants in 2016, and over 1,520,000 in its metropolitan area.Bilan ...
in 1955, where he lived until his death in 1984. His work was re-discovered in the late 1990s, and ''Cyclic Serial Zeniths from the Flux: Selected Poems of Joseph Macleod'', edited and with an introduction by Andrew Duncan, was published by Waterloo Press in 2008.
Poems
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 civilisation ::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?Bibliography
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)Novel
*''Overture to Cambridge'' (Allen & Unwin, 1936)Prose
*''People of Florence'' (Allen & Unwin, 1968)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)Autobiography
*''A Job at the BBC'' (MacLellan & Co., 1946)References
External links
*Joseph Todd Gordon Macleod
– with audio recordings
Joseph Macleod Collection at the University of Stirling Archives
{{DEFAULTSORT:Macleod, Joseph BBC newsreaders and journalists 1903 births 1984 deaths Scottish dramatists and playwrights 20th-century British poets 20th-century British dramatists and playwrights British male poets British male dramatists and playwrights 20th-century British male writers Scottish Renaissance