In a negative way, I am well qualified to write about MacDiarmid, being neither a Scotsman nor an Englishman, ignorant both of Scottish linguistics and the natural sciences, and innocent of party politics. My approach, that is to say, is an empirical one. I read the poems, whether in English or in Scots (a perfectly straightforward task, despite their supposedly comic impenetrability) without preconception or polemical interference, and conclude that their author was a poet of the very first rank, comparable with Pasternak and Neruda, Eliot and Seferis. Like Neruda, he was capable of the most strident logorrhea; like Eliot, of the most astonishing doggerel….

There was a great deal of Whitman about MacDiarmid, both in his generous humanism and in his unabashed egotism; but he possessed a lyrical subtlety, even delicacy, that Whitman lacked, and he had the good fortune to be devoted to a tradition, or...