"If I wrote a play with four characters every single one of them would talk like me regardless of age or sex"
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A confession like this is less vanity than a clean refusal of literary ventriloquism. MacCaig is admitting that character, as realism sells it, isn’t really his priority; voice is. The line lands with a sly shrug: you want four fully individuated people onstage, differentiated by age, gender, class, and biography? Fine. But the authorial instrument still has one mouthpiece. Everyone “talks like me” because the play, for him, would be a shaped argument with the world, not a documentary transcript.
The subtext is bracingly modern: authenticity doesn’t come from mimicking other people’s speech patterns, it comes from making language do unmistakable work. Poets learn early that diction isn’t decoration; it’s the engine. MacCaig’s poems are known for clarity, wit, and a conversational intelligence that never quite pretends to be neutral. Put that sensibility into a drama and you get a kind of monologic theater where the tension isn’t “who is speaking?” but “what does this mind do when it collides with experience?”
There’s also a quiet ethical edge. For a Scottish poet writing in an era when “dialect” and “character” could become caricature, the line reads like restraint: better to own the limits of your ear than to counterfeit other lives for local color. It’s an artist insisting that style is not a mask you switch out per character; it’s the signature of attention.
The subtext is bracingly modern: authenticity doesn’t come from mimicking other people’s speech patterns, it comes from making language do unmistakable work. Poets learn early that diction isn’t decoration; it’s the engine. MacCaig’s poems are known for clarity, wit, and a conversational intelligence that never quite pretends to be neutral. Put that sensibility into a drama and you get a kind of monologic theater where the tension isn’t “who is speaking?” but “what does this mind do when it collides with experience?”
There’s also a quiet ethical edge. For a Scottish poet writing in an era when “dialect” and “character” could become caricature, the line reads like restraint: better to own the limits of your ear than to counterfeit other lives for local color. It’s an artist insisting that style is not a mask you switch out per character; it’s the signature of attention.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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