The Book, Cat, & Cat Book Lovers Almanac

of historical trivia regarding books, cats, and other animals. Actually this blog has evolved so that it is described better as a blog about cats in history and culture. And we take as a theme the advice of Aldous Huxley: If you want to be a writer, get some cats. Don't forget to see the archived articles linked at the bottom of the page.

January 15, 2016

January 15, 1975

Sydney Goodsir Smith, (October 26, 1915 to January 15, 1975) a Scottish poet, is the author of these lines:

'A excellent companion for
A literary gentleman, a cat',
Said fat ould Gautier,
And, Dod, he was richt at that.



The references are to Theophile Gautier (1811 -1872) of course, and, God. This appeared in Scottish Cats: An Anthology of Scottish Cat Poems, edited by Hamish Whyte.

According to his odnb article:


Smith, Sydney Goodsir (1915-1975), poet and playwright, was born on 26 October 1915 in Wellington, New Zealand, the son of Sir Sydney Alfred Smith (1883-1969) and his wife, Catherine Goodsir Gelenick (1866/7-1962). In 1928 his father became professor of forensic medicine at the University of Edinburgh; he himself was educated there and at Oriel College, Oxford, where he gained a third class in modern history in 1937. During the Second World War he taught English to Polish troops. By the late 1940s he had emerged as the leading figure of the second wave of the Scottish literary 'Renaissance', and over the ensuing decades he gained a reputation as a convivial and cultured presence in the legendary 'writers' pubs' of Edinburgh, as well as in more conventionally scholarly circles.


Describing the range of his literary output, the Dictionary says:


The wordplay of
Under the Eildon Tree is frequently of a macaronic nature; indeed, the sequence amply demonstrates that Smith's love of language was by no means limited to Scots, and testifies to his wider European frame of cultural reference. He translated poems by Tristan Corbiere and Aleksandr Blok into Scots, and his celebrated 'The Grace of God and the Meth-Drinker' is the Edinburgh Grassmarket's equivalent of the tatterdemalion grotesqueries of a Villon or a Baudelaire....

Sydney Goodsir Smith co-edited... Hugh MacDiarmid: a Festschrift to mark that poet's seventieth birthday in 1962. It is our cultural isolation that accounts for the fact we now remember that honoree, but not the honorer. MacDiarmid wrote the introduction to Smith's posthumously published Collected Poems.

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