Selected Essays of Hugh MacDiarmid

Selected Essays of Hugh MacDiarmid, edited and introduced by Duncan Glen, brings together a wide-ranging selection of prose by the poet otherwise known as Christopher Murray Grieve, a towering figure of twentieth-century Scottish letters. While MacDiarmid is now recognized as one of the century’s great poets, his prolific prose—scattered across journals, newspapers, pamphlets, and polemical tracts—remains less accessible. Glen’s introduction situates MacDiarmid’s output within the contexts of journalism, nationalism, communism, and cultural polemic, emphasizing the urgency with which he wrote rather than stylistic polish. Trained as a reporter before the First World War and active as a journalist for over a decade thereafter, MacDiarmid developed a capacity for producing vivid, quotational, argumentative prose at speed. That facility was turned into a tool for cultural agitation: whether in The Scottish Chapbook, The Northern Review, or The Voice of Scotland, MacDiarmid used his essays to argue for a revival of Scots language, to demand recognition of Scotland’s artistic traditions, and to intervene in contemporary political debates from socialism to Douglasite economics.

The essays collected here span several decades, revealing MacDiarmid as cultural critic, propagandist, educator, and agitator. Many are framed by his broader project of a Scottish literary renaissance, in which recovering and reinventing linguistic and cultural resources were inseparable from advancing radical political commitments. Glen traces how MacDiarmid wrote not only under his own name but also pseudonymously, replying to detractors and constructing defenses of his poetry and politics in a hostile climate. The selection underscores his deep internationalism—his ability to draw on European literatures, Marx and Engels, or Ruskin and Morris—while insisting on the particularity of Scottish experience. In these essays, MacDiarmid deploys prose as a companion to his poetry: an arsenal of manifestos, critiques, and provocations that embody the restless intelligence behind his verse. This volume, long overdue, makes available the other half of MacDiarmid’s achievement and situates his cultural struggle within both Scottish and international modernism.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1969.