An entry in the Dictionary of National Biography in 1981 noted that the forensic scientist Sir Sydney Alfred Smith (1883-1969) "had one son and a daughter who became a doctor". The profession of the son, already six years dead in 1981, might have merited mention if only he'd had the good sense to stick with his medical studies at Edinburgh. As it turned out, though, the younger Sydney Smith went south after a year to read modern history at Oriel College, Oxford. His prospects went south, too he managed to get himself suspended for indiscipline, eventually graduating with a third in 1941. The poor scholar later professed amusement at the fact that his surname marked him from birth as a makar (i.e. maker), the Scots term for poet; within little more than a decade of his graduation he had confounded the uncertainty of his setting forth by forging in the smithy of the old tongue of the Lowlands many of the wittiest and most elegant Scottish poems of the twentieth century.

Scottish literary history is full of improbable transformations--of the poetaster James Macpherson into the lionized "translator" of Ossian, of the cowherd James Hogg into the magister ludi of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, of the anti-dialect campaigner C. M. Grieve into Hugh MacDiarmid--but none can match for sheer unlikelihood the makeover of the New Zealand-born, English-educated Sydney Goodsir Smith into the foremost Scots-language poet born in the past hundred years. Smith first saw the light of day on October 26, 1915 in Wellington. His father was a native of Otago who had worked his way up from pharmacist's assistant on the South Island to public medical officer in the capital via a scholarship to Edinburgh University. By the time the newly qualified doctor returned to the southern hemisphere in 1914 he had met and married the poet's Scottish mother, Catherine Goodsir Gelenick. When, after an itinerant decade, the family finally settled in Scotland on Sydney Alfred's appointment to the regius chair of forensic medicine at Edinburgh in 1928, Sydney Goodsir was dispatched to Malvern College to continue an education hitherto conducted mainly at a Dorset prep school. For the rest of his life he spoke in what to Scottish ears was an upper-class English accent.

Asa young man Smith was intoxicated by the strangeness of the speech he heard all round him in Edinburgh and its environs, and by his discovery of the poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid, then "spleet-new frae the mint". In psychology, politics and phonology, MacDiarmid's verse was founded on a faith in the distinctiveness of the language used in the south-eastern half of Scotland. Scots is Teutonic rather than Celtic in origin, and retains many Middle English elements long lost from its sister tongue south of the border. The unabashed vigour of the various subdialects that survive from Galloway to the Moray Firth (where Scots is known as "the Doric") can still take visitors by surprise and leave them lost for comprehension....