Mark:

Ooops!! Sorry (and to Matthew too) -- it was actually Matthew Francis in a
post immediately after yours, and I managed to conflate the two of you
(shades of Dan McGee).

> Robin: the second quote wasn't me, and I could use your help with aword:
> kailyard means what?

"Kailyard" is literally the cabbage (well, strictly, kail, a species of
vegetable fed to animals and sometimes humans) patch. The Kailyard School
is used to refer to poets and novelists of the late nineteenth / early
twentieth century who presented a sentimentalised and idealised image of
the Scottish countryside, in a rather thin and mawkish version of "Scots".
S.R.Crockett's _The Stickit Minister_ is one which comes to mind (though I
prefer his _The Red Axe_ which +isn't+ set in Scotland). There's also Ian
MacLaren's _Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush_.

The obscurities come together (unless you know the background!) in the last
paragraph of the first chapter of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's _Sunset Song_:

So that was Kinraddie that bleak winter of nineteen eleven and the new
minister, him they chose early next year, he was to say it was the Scots
countryside itself, fathered between a kailyard and a bonny brier bush in
the lee of a house with green shutters. And what he meant by that you
could guess at yourself if you'd a mind for puzzles and dirt, there wasn't
a house with green shutters in the whole of Kinraddie.

_The House With The Green Shutters_ is the title of a novel by Geoge
Douglas Brown which was distinctly _not_ kailyard -- premature
anti-kailyard, in fact.

I can't for the life of me think of the names of any poets in the movement
off-hand. Anyway, it all became ancient history when MacDiarmid published
_Sangshaw_ in 1925, and Gibbon restarted the novel in _A Scots Quair_.

Apologies and profound grovels once more to both Mark and Matthew form my
misatributed quote ...

Robin