MacDiarmid, Hugh (1892–1978)

Scottish poet. A nationalist and Marxist, he was one of the founders in 1928 of the National Party of Scotland. His works include ‘A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle’ (1926) and the collections First Hymn to Lenin (1931) and Second Hymn to Lenin (1935), in which poetry is made relevant to politics. He developed a form of modern poetic Scots, based on an amalgam of Middle and Modern Scots, and was the leader of the Scottish literary renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. Complete Poems 1920–1976 was published in 1978 and Selected Poems in 1992.

Other volumes of poetry include Sangschaw (1925), Penny Wheep (1926), To Circumjack Cencrastus (1930), Scots Unbound (1932), In Memoriam James Joyce (1955), and The Kind of Poetry I Want (1961), the last two comprising his poetical ‘world view’ written in English, to which he turned after 1940. Critical works are Contemporary Scottish Studies (1924), Albyn, or Scotland and the Future (1927), At the Sign of the Thistle (1934), and Scottish Eccentrics (1936). He also edited The Golden Treasury of Scottish Poetry (1941).