The first poetry [MacDiarmid] wrote was in English, and was not particularly distinguished. Gradually and deviously, between 1921 and 1923, he began to move towards the position of believing that Scots might be revived, and carried out his own experiments in Scottish poetry. What was clear to him—and it is his great historical importance to have seen this—was that the moment had come for an exploration of Scottish vocabulary and idiom quite different from the debased, sentimental, jocose, moralizing tradition of nineteenth-century Scottish verse: in other words, Scots could be placed, and worked in, against the background of European symbolism and modernism…. The poems in Sangschaw (1925) and Penny Wheep (1926), mostly short lyrics, are the first fruits of that enthusiasm, and the former volume is one of the landmarks of modern Scottish poetry. (pp. 6-7)

For those who believe that lyrics are not enough (and MacDiarmid is certainly one...