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Sorley MacLean and J. B. Caird met in Edinburgh while the former was taking teacher training at Moray House, and Caird was a second year undergraduate in the University of Edinburgh. J. B.Caird’s close friend, the young philosophy student George Davie, introduced the two men. The most detailed account of their friendship is given in [J. B.] Caird’s essay ‘Sorley MacLean: a Personal View’ (Sorley MacLean. Critical Essays). When Caird first met Sorley MacLean, he recalled that, along with his scholarly bent, he thought that he was a perfervid Gael and a man of strong socialist convictions. He felt that he was a man of absolute integrity and intellectual honesty, but, at the same time, he had too trusting and generous a nature. Caird described the young poet in these terms: ‘In company he sat in silence, brooding over something or other (he had little gift for small talk), until a chance remark on a subject that touched him would arouse his interest. He would rise to his fee, his eyes would flash, and a torrent of rhythmically cadenced, magnificent language would pour forth: a kind of vatic fury would possess him’. Writing of the complementary influences of J B Caird and George Davie, Sorley MacLean said of Caird: ‘Caird was, I think, outstanding, as I said, in his combination of literature and what I would call sensibility’. Their literary discussions ranged over Greek, Latin, French, English and Scottish poetry, and on the work of poets such as Yeats, Eliot, Valéry, Pound, Lawrence, MacDiarmid, and the emerging MacSpaunday group (Auden, MacNeice, Spender and Day Lewis, so termed by their critics), but, in Caird’s words, ‘We nearly always came back to MacDiarmid and Yeats, to whose work we were passionately devoted’.
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