New Selected Letters

MacDiarmid Hugh

"These great people like MacDiarmid are a bit scary", says the Scottish poet Liz Lochhead. And Kathleen Jamie: "Drunk? Men? Thistle? What?... No. No, not for
me".

It was not ever thus. Dylan Thomas declared: "Every door in any town should be wide open to that great lyric poet Hugh MacDiarmid". Sean O'Casey was of a like mind: "Lord God, this fellow is a poet, singing a song even when pain seizes him, or the woe of the world murmurs in his heart"; and Yeats wrote to him to say, "You have done many lovely and passionate things". Norman MacCaig issued a warning: "Watch him, an angel's set his tongue on fire".

The extraordinary man he was, brilliant, volatile, deeply prejudiced, deeply generous, emerges most clearly in his letters. There have been previous collec-tions but none so essential as this, including many previously unpublished documents, drawn from his long and controversial life. Among the editors is his own grandson, Dorian Grieve.

On the centenary of his birth in 1992, Carcanet launched the MacDiarmid 2000 programme, to bring all his major writings into print. This is the thirteenth volume.

About the Author

Hugh MacDiarmid (Christopher Murray Grieve) was born in 1892 at Langholm in the Scottish Borders. After training as a teacher, he worked as a journalist, before serving in France and Greece during the First World War. Returning to Scotland, he worked as a journalist, and in 1922 began to publish poems in Scots. From that point he became a key figure in the Scottish Renaissance. He became a founder-member of the Scottish National Party in 1928, and joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1934. He was expelled from both during the 1930s, although he rejoined the Communist Party in 1956. Between 1933 and 1942 he lived with his second wife in the Shetlands. In 1951 he settled with his family at Brownsbank, near Biggar, where he lived until his death in 1978.

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