MacDiarmid, Hugh

MacDiarmid, Hugh, the pseudonym of Christopher Murray Grieve (1892–1978), poet and critic, was a founder (in 1928) of the National Party of Scotland, but was expelled in 1933; he joined (1934) the Communist party from which he was expelled in 1938. In 1922, influenced by Ulysses, he began to write lyrics in a synthetic Scots that drew on various dialects and fortified the oral idiom with archaisms. His masterpiece, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), presents a vision that remakes Scotland in the MacDiarmidian image; a drunk man comes to consciousness on a hillside and has to contend with the huge thistle that confronts him symbolically in the moonlight; the alcoholic spirit wears off and is replaced by a spiritual awareness of what Scotland can be. MacDiarmid's Scots literary renaissance of the 1920s was followed by his political poetry of the 1930s; in 1931 he published his First Hymn to Lenin and thereby initiated the leftist verse of the decade. His autobiography Lucky Poet (1943) deeply offended the officials of his native Langholm. MacDiarmid scored some of his greatest poetic triumphs in English, albeit a synthetic English. His long meditative poem ‘On a Raised Beach’, from Stony Limits (1934), is a subtle statement of the MacDiarmidian metaphysic: ‘I will have nothing interposed | Between my sensitiveness and the barren but beautiful reality.’ His later work comprises a series of long, linguistically dense poems amounting to a modern epic of the Celtic consciousness. MacDiarmid's Complete Poems 1920–1976, edited by Michael Grieve and W. R. Aitken, appeared (posthumously) in 1978 and his letters were edited (1984) by A. Bold. (See also Scots.)