ABSTRACT
In A Drunk Man, as we have seen, MacDiarmid portrayed the thistle-crucified Scot rising to resurrection in Montrose, coincidentally as 'A greater Christ, a greater Burns'. When the autonomous items incorporated into the poem are considered out of the context of Cencrastus they take their place among the finest things MacDiarmid published. It is MacDiarmid's intention, in other poems in this sequence, to project himself as a biological and spiritual advance on Lenin; to show how he, the poet, has evolved into a unique individual in touch with the ultimate source of creativity. In three related poems 'The Hole in the Wall', 'Another Turn of the Screw', 'The Seamless Garment' the poet momentarily drops his poetic elitism in an attempt to appeal to his fellow Borderers on a popular level. The ostentatiously experimental poems in this book used a language MacDiarmid called Aggrandised Scots which was designed to deal with abstruse scientific and philosophical matters. This, the poet's most joyful showpiece in Synthetic Scots, is addressed (appropriately enough) to James Joyce. As we have seen, 'Depth and the Chthonian Image' contained a credo of MacDiarmid's perpetual quest for the source of creativity. John Davidson, as we have already seen, was a poetic hero. In 'Second Hymn to Lenin' MacDiarmid had mentioned Goethe as a great poet whose work was nevertheless inaccessible to the majority of men; here he continues the dialectical argument with 'dialectic logic workin' at aince/In coontless coonter ways' (356).
