Hugh MacDiarmid

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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.)

MacDIARMID, Hugh, pen name of Christopher Murray Grieve [1892–1978]. Scottish poet, critic, and polemicist, leader of the LALLANS movement. Born and educated in Langholm, a Border town whose dialect and traditions contributed to the striking individuality of his poetic style, Grieve was a founder (1928) of the National Party of Scotland (expelled 1933) and a member of the Communist Party (expelled 1938, rejoined 1956). Although passionately committed to Scottish cultural and political nationalism, he was at first unconvinced of the viability of SCOTS for 20c poetry. His discovery of the extent and expressiveness of Scots vocabulary, however, particularly as recorded in Jamieson's Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language (1808), prompted him to experiment with a Synthetic Scots, first for short lyrics, then for extended metaphysical poem-sequences (most importantly A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, 1926) showing a linguistic virtuosity and a spirit of philosophical exploration not attempted in Scots poetry since medieval times. His success in revitalizing poetry in the language has been marked.

Hugh MacDiarmid , pseud. of Christopher Murray Grieve, 1892–1978, Scottish poet and critic, b. Langholm, Dumfrieshire. Passionately devoted to Communism and to Scottish independence from England, he was a founder of the Scottish Nationalist Party in 1928. He was the core figure in the "Scottish renaissance" of the interwar years. Among his many works are At the Sign of the Thistle (1934), essays; A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1962, rev. ed. 1971), a long poem castigating his fellow Scots; Collected Poems (1962), More Collected Poems (1971), and The Socialist Poems (1978). MacDiarmid was a masterful poet in both English and Scots, which he revived as a modern literary language.

Bibliography: See his autobiography, Lucky Poet (1943, rev. ed. 1972); studies by D. Glen (1972), A. C. Davis and P. C. Scott (1980).

MacDiarmid, Hugh (1892–1978) Scottish poet and critic, b. Christopher Murray Grieve. A nationalist and communist, MacDiarmid was the dominant poetic voice in Scotland from the early 1920s. His revival of Scots as a medium for poetry contributed to the 20th-century Scottish renaissance, of which A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926) is the poetic masterpiece.