Tom Scott expressed the concerns at the core of his work in an autobiographical essay for Contemporary Poets in 1975. Here he depicts himself as a social idealist, whose inspiration appears both in visions of the Good Society and satires of the current social order. He is, specifically, a Scottish nationalist "more concerned with the salvation of my nation than that of my own soul." The most typical and conspicuous sign of his nationalist enthusiasms appeared when he shifted the language of his poetry from the standard English of his early work to a native Scots. (His prose, however, is written in English.) All in all, his "utopian socialism" is of a "moral-aesthetic" nature, and so may be realized, he believes, as he exercises and refines the instrument of the national language, not by political activism.

Born in Glasgow, Scotland, Tom Scott was the son of a boilermaker and...