To Circumjack MacDiarmid

More than Eliot or Pound, the career of Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid reflects the restless nature of the modern age. From his early opposition to poetry in Scots to the triumphant use of dialect in "Sangschaw"; from these exquisite lyrics to the long dynamic poems "A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle" and "To Circumjack Cencrastus"; from the abandonment of Scots to the glacial, "scientific" English of the unassembled "Mature Art" - most critics have limited themselves to a single phase of MacDiarmid's career. This study attempts, in his own phrase to "circumjack" or "fully explicate" a troubling but brilliant author. Examining his earliest work, Herbert posits a symbolic structure which governs all MacDiarmid's periods, as well as explaining his need for ceaseless change. MacDiarmid emerges as a modernist of international stature, but also as a radical experimenter whose work anticipates post-modernist concerns.