ABSTRACT
Montrose, that small town on the east coast of Scotland, may not immediately spring to mind as a likely setting for the most celebrated poetic experiment in twentieth-century Scottish literature yet it was there that Christopher Murray Grieve, town councillor and local reporter with The Montrose Review, created Hugh MacDiarmid and invented a modernistic idiom known as Synthetic Scots. It was MacDiarmid's repeated contention that Synthetic Scots was a linguistic idiom particularly suited to a modernist consciousness. MacDiarmid's poem combines narrative elements with Symbolism, epic with anecdote, lyricism with satire. Yet the original idea of the poem may have been to produce an exercise in what G. Gregory Smith defined as the quintessential contrariness of Scottish literature.
