MacDiarmid … never recognised [a] kind of absentee landlordism of the spirit: one of the aspects of his achievement worth stressing is the way he has got most of himself onto the page…. The contemplative centre we value so much in Eliot and Edwin Muir is there, but also the coarser activity, the sparks from the rim of the wheel, Pride, humour, contrariness; patriotism, hatred, nostalgia; love, lust, longing: there is no contemporary poem more varied in mood than The Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. And since there is no achievement without an accompanying technique, the poem is a showpiece of MacDiarmid's early virtuosity, like Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, another poem in which a poet examines the civilisation he is involved with….

[It] is clearly from medieval Scottish poetry that MacDiarmid inherits his ability to move from lyric to flyting, as well as his grasp of physical reality. (p...