George Mackay Brown is not only a poet but also an acknowledged novelist and a sensitive writer of short stories and plays. His successes in poetry and the prose narrative are considerable, and the really surprising thing about him is not so much his extensive talents, but rather that he is not more widely known as one of Britain's outstanding contemporary authors. Unfortunately, he has a somewhat retiring disposition and is not given to advancing his accomplishments. In fact, he behaves as if genuinely astonished that attention is accorded to anything he has written.

Two aspects of Brown's personal convictions are important to keep in mind: his rejection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century concepts of progress and his personal belief that Scotland (as he phrases it in his prologue to The Storm and Other Poems, 1954) is a "Knox-ruined nation," that is destroyed by the Calvinist reformer John Knox. Perhaps...