'I may claim thee for my ain': the Scottish voice in First World War poetry

This chapter considers the extent to which there was a distinctive Scottish voice in the poetry of the First World War. Starting from the assertion of a generic British popular culture before the war, it examines the ways in which Scottish poets negotiated that culture: often working within its conventions and constraints, but in some cases, particularly those of Joseph Lee and Roderick Watson Kerr, deploying irony and dialect to construct a poetry distanced from English poetry and helping lay the ground for what would become the Scottish Renaissance