Sydney Goodsir Smith, the author of some of this century's finest love poetry, was also, after Hugh MacDiarmid, perhaps the most important poet to write in Scots since Robert Burns. The most prominent of the second wave of poets who, under MacDiarmid's influence, saw themselves as part of a twentieth-century Scottish literary renaissance, Smith performed the signal service of recapturing for his generation some of the heady emotional, nationalistic, and linguistic exuberance which had helped make MacDiarmid's Scots poems of the 1920s so memorable but which had been partially lost in MacDiarmid's more recent work. Smith's poetic canon, despite great unevenness and some monotony of theme and attitude, contains work of rare quality. Almost as important, at times, was his role, for three decades after the war, as a social focus for some of Edinburgh's most vital literary life. His achievement in all these respects seems the more...