For twenty years I've believed Hugh MacDiarmid, along with Yeats, Pound, and Eliot, to be one of the four great pioneer poets of our century. Now I know it.

The transformation of faith to certainty comes from the publication of MacDiarmid's Complete Poems 1920–1976….

Not Burns but the great medieval Scottish poets …—Dunbar, Gavin Douglas, Sir David Lindsay of the Mount—were progenitors of [MacDiarmid's first "Lallans" poems]. His earlier English verses seem to owe most to James Joyce and T. E. Brown, though the later MacDiarmid was to acknowledge a debt to John Davidson and the still under-rated C. M. Doughty (all Celts be it noted).

The early Joycean influence comes as a surprise…. The publication of "A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle" in 1926 launched what is now known as the Scottish Renaissance. The "Lailans" in which it is written is not current speech but a synthetic...