[The] mindless, sentimental poetry in Scots explains not only the vehemence of [MacDiarmid's] satire on St. Andrew's societies and Burns clubs in [A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle] but the manner and matter of the poem, highbrow in the extreme, as far removed as possible from the kailyard, or often popular in form and images but applied ironically and unexpectedly to sacred or intellectual topics. (p. 86)

[A Drunk Man] forms more of a unity than most non-narrative long poems, like Pound's The Pisan Cantos. This sense of unity is all the more impressive in an undivided poem (undivided except for rows of periods and changes of type face and verse form), to which the poet refused to provide handrails, as he defiantly asserts to philistines in his Author's Note. Its unity derives most obviously from its form, an interior monologue in which the Drunk Man speaks, somewhat...