MacDIARMID, Hugh

A monumentally truculent literary character, he was expelled from the Scottish Nationalist Party in the 1930s for his Communism and soon afterwards bounced from the Communist Party for his Scottish Nationalism. His earliest major work, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), is frequently credited with awakening nationalistic consciousness in Scottish writers. Taking his own advice, MacDiarmid produced poems in self-taught Scots that are barely comprehensible to English-speaking readers—a literary...