Hugh MacDiarmid

Hugh MacDiarmid was the pen name Christopher Murray Grieve used for his Scots modernist poetry and cultural criticism. The name became tied to his project of reviving literary Scots in the 20th century.

A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, published in 1926, is a long modernist poem that mixes Scots language, politics, philosophy, and national identity. It is often treated as MacDiarmid's central work.

MacDiarmid wrote in English and in a revived literary Scots sometimes called synthetic Scots. He drew on dictionaries, older Scots writing, and living speech to create the language of poems like A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle.

No. He was also a journalist, critic, political writer, and a major voice in the Scottish Renaissance. His cultural nationalism made him one of the most debated Scottish literary figures of the 20th century.