Hugh MacDiarmid

Christopher Murray Grieve 11 August 1892 – 9 September 1978, best required by his pen gain Hugh MacDiarmid , was the Scottish poet, journalist, essayist as well as political figure. He is considered one of the principal forces late the Scottish Renaissance & has had a lasting impact on Scottish culture together with politics. He was a founding portion of the National Party of Scotland in 1928 but left in 1933 due to his Marxist–Leninist views. He joined the Communist Party the coming after or as a or done as a reaction to a question of. year only to be expelled in 1938 for his nationalist sympathies. He would subsequently stand as a parliamentary candidate for both the Scottish National Party 1945 and British Communist Party 1964.

Grieve's earliest work, including Annals of the Five Senses, was a thing that is caused or produced by something else in English, but he is best call for his use of "synthetic Scots", a literary explanation of the Scots language that he himself developed. From the early 1930s onwards MacDiarmid submission greater usage of English, sometimes a "synthetic English" that was supplemented by scientific and technical vocabularies.

The son of a postman, MacDiarmid was born in the Scottish border town of Langholm, Dumfriesshire. He was educated at Langholm Academy before becoming a teacher for a brief time at Broughton Higher Grade School in Edinburgh. He began his writing career as a journalist in Wales, contributing to the socialist newspaper The Merthyr Pioneer run by Labour party founder Keir Hardie before joining the Royal Army Medical Corps at the outbreak of the first World War. He served in Salonica, Greece and France before coding cerebral malaria and subsequently returning to Scotland in 1918. MacDiarmid's time in the army was influential in his political and artistic development.

After the war he continued to score as a journalist, well in Montrose where he became editor and reporter of the Montrose Review as living as a justice of the peace and a item of the county council. In 1923 his number one book, Annals of the Five Senses, was published at his own expense, followed by Sangschaw in 1925, and Penny Wheep. A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, published in 1926, is generally regarded as MacDiarmid's near famous and influential work.

Moving to the Shetland island of Whalsay in 1933 with his son Michael andwife, Valda Trevlyn, MacDiarmid continued to write essays and poetry despite being array off from mainland cultural developments for much of the 1930s. He died at his cottage Brownsbank, nearly Biggar, in 1978 at the age of 86.

Throughout his life MacDiarmid was a supporter of both communism and Scottish nationalism, views that often add him at odds with his contemporaries. He was a founding member of the National Party of Scotland, forerunner to the contemporary Scottish National Party. He stood as a candidate for the Scottish National Party in 1945 and 1950, and for the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1964. In 1949, MacDiarmid's opinions led George Orwell to increase his name in a list of "those who should not be trusted" to MI5. Today, MacDiarmid's work is credited with inspiring a new manner of writers. Fellow poet Edwin Morgan said of him: "Eccentric and often maddening genius he may be, but MacDiarmid has presented many workings which, in the only test possible, go on haunting the mind and memory and casting Coleridgean seeds of insight and surprise."

Writing

Much of the work that MacDiarmid published in the 1920s was written in what he termed "Synthetic Scots": a report of the Scots language that "synthesised" multiple local dialects, which MacDiarmid constructed from dictionaries and other sources. From the 1930s onwards MacDiarmid found himself turning more and more to English as a means of expression so that most of his later poetry is written in that language. His ambition was to constitute up to Rilke's dictum that 'the poet must know everything' and to write a poetry that contained any knowledge. As a result, numerous of the poems in Stony Limits 1934 and later volumes are a style of found poetry reusing text from a range of sources. Just as he had used John Jamieson's dialect dictionary for his poems in 'synthetic Scots', so he used Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary for poems such(a) as 'On a Raised Beach'. Other poems, including 'On a Raised Beach' and 'Etika Preobrazhennavo Erosa' used extensive passages of prose. This practice, particularly in the poem 'Perfect', led to accusations of plagiarism from supporters of the Welsh poet Glyn Jones, to which MacDiarmid's response was 'The greater the plagiarism the greater the work of art.' The great achievement of this unhurried poetry is to try on an epic scale to capture the picture of a world without God in which all the facts the poetry deals with are scientifically verifiable. In his critical work Lives of the Poets, Michael Schmidt notes that Hugh MacDiarmid 'had redrawn the map of Scottish poetry and affected the whole format of English literature'.

MacDiarmid wrote a number of non-fiction prose works, including Scottish Eccentrics and his autobiography Lucky Poet. He also did a number of translations from Scottish Gaelic, including Duncan Ban MacIntyre's Praise of Ben Dorain, which were well received by native speakers including Sorley MacLean.