The Revolutionary Art of the Future

Overview

A selection from 300 recently discovered poems by Hugh MacDiarmid, who 25 years after his death is still a dissenting voice, are presented in this collection. The power of derisive laughter and the poetic imagination to combat ignorance, prejudice, and stupidity are celebrated by MacDiarmid in these provocative poems on sexuality and marriage. Many of the poems satirize the hypocrisy of the church and bourgeois complacency and powerfully indict the brutality of imperialism and its consequences for war. Discovered by John Manson in the archives of the National Library of Scotland, this is the first time many of these poems have appeared in print.

Reviews

“Hugh MacDiarmid prepared the ground for a Scottish literature that would be self-critical and experimental in relation to its own inherited forms and idioms, but one that would also be stimulated by developments elsewhere in world literature.”  —Seamus Heaney

“A major modernist poet and the greatest since Burns to use Scots language.”  —The Sunday Times

“The great maverick figure of twentieth-century Scottish literature.”  —The Herald

Author Biography

Hugh MacDiarmid is the pen name of Christopher Murray Grieve. He is considered the father of the Scottish literary renaissance.