"The best poetry written in our generation in the British Isles has been in Scottish Gaelic, by Sorley MacLean."

“MacLean's voice had a certain bardic weirdness that sounded both stricken and enraptured.”

“The whole prospect of Gaelic appals me, the more I think of the difficulties and the likelihood of its extinction in a generation or two. A ... language with ... no modern prose of any account, no philosophical or technical vocabulary to speak of, no correct usage except among old people and a few university students, colloquially full of gross English idiom lately taken over, exact shades of meanings of most words not to be found in any of its dictionaries and dialectally varying enormously Above all, all economic, social and political factors working against it, and, with that, the notorious, moral cowardice of the Highlanders themselves.”

“Although MacLean was very much cast as a representative of Gaelic Scotland when his writing was rediscovered and justly celebrated in the 1980s and afterwards, the resulting mix is comparatively unGaelic, elitist rather then populist, and permeable only with difficulty to the community which uses the language in its day to day existence.”

“How many people know that the best living Scottish poet, by a whole head and shoulders, after the two major figures in this century, Edwin Muir and Hugh MacDiarmid, is not any of the English writing pocts, but Sorley MacLean? Yet he alone takes his place easily and indubitably beside these two major poets: and he writes only in Gaelic That Sorley MacLean is a great poet in the Gaelic tradition, a man not merely for time, but for eternity, I have no doubt whatever If MacLean is not a major poet, then I do not know what major poetry is.”

“I personally have a great sense of honour and gratitude just for knowing him... It's easier for us to trust in the utter reality of poetry, trust in it as a necessity because you feel it's verified by somebody like him. He saved Gaelic poetry... in this century and therefore in a sense, saved it for all time.”

“My obsession was the preservation of the Gaelic language so that there would be people left in the world who could hear its great songs as they really were. No poetry could be translated, still less could song poetry, and the great language of Gaelic song made me fanatical about the beauty of the Gaelic language and its astonishing ability to indicate shades and positions of emphasis with natural inversions and the use of particles.”