Sorley MacLean
Sorley MacLean (; 26 October 1911 – 24 November 1996) was a Scottish Gaelic poet, described by the Scottish Poetry Library as "one of the major Scottish poets of the modern era" because of his "mastery of his chosen medium and his engagement with the European poetic tradition and European politics". Nobel Prize Laureate Seamus Heaney credited MacLean with saving Scottish Gaelic poetry.
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.