[Hugh MacDiarmid] has been consistently in the public eye since his early thirties, when the young Lowland Scot Christopher Grieve adopted a more "Highlands"-sounding pseudonym in the early 1920's and published his first poems in a Lallas Scots patois, challenging the hegemony of English letters and politics in the British Isles. The assertion of a Scots language (contemporaneous with Ireland's discovery of Gaelic tradition) registered MacDiarmid's emotional commitment to Scots nationalism as well as his aesthetic preferences: he almost single-handedly generated the Scottish Renaissance Movement of the twenties and thirties and was a founding member of the Scottish National Party; and he has consistently represented the literary work as an aesthetic weapon in his nationalist program. A national literature—or more specifically, the recognition that a native Scots tradition has always existed, despite attempts by the English to obscure its importance—has been MacDiarmid's battleground in the...