“Hugh MacDiarmid” was the pseudonym of Christopher Murray Grieve (1892-1978), born in the small Border town of Langholm in Dumfriesshire, the eldest of two sons of John Grieve, a local postman, and Elizabeth Graham, the daughter of a farm labourer. When Grieve first introduced “MacDiarmid” in 1922, as the author of lyric poems in Scots published in the
Scottish Chapbook, he presented his readership with a persona that was to dominate the Scottish vernacular movement and the growth of Scottish Nationalism in the 20s and 30s. As Grieve’s career developed, the figure of Hugh MacDiarmid came also to champion both a communist social ethic and national self-determination, while generating voluminous “poetry of fact”. For more than fifty years, the combined figures of Grieve and…
3554 words
Citation: Matthews, Kirsten. "Hugh MacDiarmid". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 21 June 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2843, accessed 21 November 2024.]
