ABSTRACT
It is appropriately ironical that the best-known bit of English verse associated with the name of Hugh MacDiarmid should be the montage, or found-poem, 'Perfect'. Nevertheless the poetic career of MacDiarmid was built on the early English verse of Christopher Murray Grieve. The sonnets usually build up to a climax and the upward movement of apsiration is an important and permanent feature of MacDiarmid's poetry. Before Annals appeared in print, Grieve had invented MacDiarmid and had embarked on the most far-reaching literary experiment in twentieth-century Scottish literature. MacDiarmid's lyrics showed a new kind of Scots poetry and lifted the Scottish poetic spirit out of a post-Burnsian depression. His polemical terminology was often misleading and Scottish Renaissance was only apposite as a reference to a one-man campaign. His cerebral conception took shape in its emotional matrix and it is immediately apparent that the Scots he used was not only found but felt.
