Sorley MacLean
Sorley MacLean was born at Òsgaig on the island of Raasay on 26 October 1911; Scottish Gaelic was his first language. Before he went to school at the age of six, he spoke very little English. He was the second of five sons born to Malcolm (1880–1951) and Christina MacLean (1886–1974). The family owend a small croft and ran a tailoring business, but they later gave up the croft to move to a better house, which proved detrimental to their finances when the Great Depression took a high toll on the tailoring business. His brothers were John Maclean (1910–1970), a schoolteacher and later rector of Oban High School, who was also a piper; Calum Maclean (1915–1960), a noted folklorist and ethnographer; and Alasdair (1918–1999) and Norman (c.1917–c.1980), who became general practitioners. Sorley's two younger sisters, Isobel and Mary, were also schoolteachers. His patronymic was Somhairle mac Chaluim 'ic Chaluim 'ic Iain 'ic Tharmaid 'ic Iain 'ic Tharmaid; he could not trace his genealogy with certainty to the eighth generation.
Dàin do Eimhir
Because of his socialist convictions, Sorley MacLean wanted to fight in the Spanish Civil War, but was prevented by family circumstances. In 1937, MacLean, then working as an English teacher at Portree High School, met and fell in love with Nessa O’Shea, an Irish woman whom he believed to be romantically involved with a friend; MacLean did not approach her and she later married someone else. She inspired the poem "An Roghainn" (Dàin do Eimhir XXII) in which the narrator chooses between a love interest and going to fight in Spain. Later, he went to teach on Mull, where the devastation from nineteenth-century clearances—in which many MacLeans had been evicted—had a profound effect on him. MacLean later said that "I believe Mull had much to do with my poetry: its physical beauty, so different from Skye’s, with the terrible imprint of the clearances on it, made it almost intolerable for a Gael." This period of his life has been described as "an immensely creative anguish", because it led to the writing of the Eimhir cycle and "An Cuilthionn". He wrote most of the poetry that would become "Dàin do Eimhir" while teaching at Boroughmuir High School in Edinburgh, and in Hawick between 1939 and 1941.