All About Scotland

MacDiarmid poured his fervent nationalism into his poetry and during the 1920s, he was at the forefront of a movement to revive Scots as a vigorous poetic language. He wrote in an extended version of Scots which was largely of his own devising. He produced several volumes of outstanding lyrical verse before creating in 1926 his impassioned satirical masterpiece 'A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle', which has been described as 'the greatest long poem ever produced in Scotland'. During periods spent in London, on Whalsay in Shetland and latterly in Biggar, he continue to feed the Scottish Renaissance movement with a prodigious outpouring of poetry and essays which elevated his literary genius to an international stature.