Hugh MacDiarmid

Hugh MacDiarmid was the pen name of Christopher Murray Grieve, a Scottish poet, journalist, essayist and political figure born in Langholm, Dumfriesshire, in 1892 and dead in 1978. He is considered one of the principal forces behind the Scottish Renaissance. His earliest poetry was in English, but he is best known for writing in what he called synthetic Scots, a literary version of the Scots language that he developed himself. From the early 1930s he used English more, sometimes a synthetic English enriched with scientific and technical vocabulary. His long poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, published in 1926, is generally regarded as his most famous and influential work. He was also a founding member of the National Party of Scotland and a candidate for both the Scottish National Party and the Communist Party of Great Britain.