Hugh MacDiarmid: the poet and thinker who divided opinion

Born in the Borders in 1892, MacDiarmid's legacy is still felt in Scotland's literature and politics, though his personal views see him often viewed with unease and even disdain.

His modernist poem, “A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle” published in 1925, is considered MacDiarmid's most seminal work.

The stream of consciousness poem evokes a man in a field looking at the thistle, the national flower of Scotland, and in turn examining the Scottish nation and our psyche.

MacDiarmid, who died in 1978, was a controversial figure, and his role in the founding of a precursor to the SNP, combined with his fascist sympathies, see him still debated to this day.

Hugh MacDiarmid at home with pipe in August 1972. PIC Hamish Campbell/TSPL.

Few of Scotland's rich coterie of literary figures inspire such heated emotions as poet and writer Hugh MacDiarmid.

His murkier political allegiances still see him used, in the eyes of one independence-supporting academic, as a stick to beat the modern party with.

Dr Scott Lyall of Edinburgh Napier University, has written a number of works on MacDiarmid.

He said: “MacDiarmid was drawn, to varying degrees, to authoritarian political movements - both communism and fascism - and it would specious to deny that. Contemporary unionists, of course, love to point out the murkier areas of MacDiarmid's politics.

“However, I think his politicking in his own time, and the weaponisation of his politics in our era, has somewhat hampered a clear view of MacDiarmid as a poet.

“He is one of the great modernist poets, on a par with Pound and Eliot, and a poem such as 'On a Raised Beach', written when he lived in Shetland in the 1930s, should be read in that light. In this sense, he certainly remains undervalued.”

Dr David Goldie, Senior Lecturer in English at Strathclyde University, offered his own assessment of the mixed feeling around MacDiarmid.

He told the Scotsman: “At his best MacDiarmid offered a new confidence and a new energy in Scottish literature, reinventing Scots as a world literary language – a language flexible enough to deal not just in couthy sentiment and traditional wisdom but to explore difficult propositional and philosophical ideas.

“But MacDiarmid’s ambition came at a cost – in his desire to make Scots a respectable literary language he closed his mind to its popular uses, especially its use as a means of communication in the home and workplace and in popular culture.

“His belief in the higher purposes of nationalism meant that he became humourless, Anglophobic, and deaf to the actual culture around him."

“He ended up as prophet without honour in his own country, largely ignored by readerships who had moved on from the abstractions of high Modernism and by an increasingly sophisticated political nationalism that found him an embarrassment to their cause.”