This essay is a kind of appendage to Iain Crichton Smith's The Golden Lyric … [see excerpt above], which was at once a wonderful appreciation of Hugh MacDiarmid's early poems, and a wonderful polemic against his later development. (p. 211)

I agree with Crichton Smith that MacDiarmid's later poetry is extraordinarily uneven, and also that the unevenness comes partly from a demand for submission, for practical assent, upon the part of the reader, that is not a properly poetic demand. But I think one can make a much better case for much of MacDiarmid's later poetry, if one thinks of the argument in the poems as being directed not against a reader who is being bullied but against MacDiarmid himself…. The element of greatness in MacDiarmid's later poetry lies in an inwardness, an unending inner struggle, in a strenuously lonely man, whose loneliness can, for the reader, be an emblem...