Education Quote by Hugh MacDiarmid

A jab disguised as a compliment, MacDiarmid’s line flatters “principal writers” while quietly indicting the machinery that claims to produce them. The key word is “escaping”: education isn’t just inadequate, it’s a net. For a poet who spent his career arguing with polite British literary culture from a stubbornly Scottish angle, the phrasing reads like cultural insurgency. He’s not praising ignorance; he’s praising the kind of mind that refuses to be processed.

The intent is polemical. “Regular education” stands in for an entire regime of taste: standardized syllabi, credentialed authority, the tacit agreement that literature is something you inherit rather than something you make. MacDiarmid’s modernist energy depended on friction with that regime. His Scots-inflected project (linguistic, national, aesthetic) treated “proper” English and “proper” schooling as parallel forces of domestication. To be “fortunate” is to have avoided being trained into deference.

The subtext is also a class and empire critique. Regular education, especially in early 20th-century Britain, sorted people into acceptable voices and unacceptable ones. A writer who “escapes” retains the right to sound wrong, to raid dialect, to be excessive, to invent a tradition rather than cite one. It’s an argument that art is less a product of instruction than of resistance.

Context matters: modernism loved the pose of the autodidact, but MacDiarmid weaponizes it locally. He’s defending the writer as outsider not for romance, but for leverage - because the culture he’s pushing against is still pretending to be neutral.