Christopher Grieve, writing under the name of Hugh MacDiarmid, was a major modern poet and founder of the Scottish literary Renaissance. In this study of his poetry, John Baglow eliminates what has been a stumbling block for most MacDiarmid scholars by showing the very real thematic and psycological consistency which underlines MacDiarmid's work. He demonstrates the extent to which the work was dominated by a desire to find a faith that could justify his desire to write poetry, a desire continually thwarted by a critical intellect which destroyed whatever faith he was able to construct. This constant search without a successful conclusion is at the heart of the work of many major modernist writers; MacDiarmid's poetry can be seen as embracing this tradition and making it explicit.

Baglow shows that this search for justification was a focus for MacDiarmid almost from the start, but that it was only with his development of "synthetic Scots" that he begin to grapple with it directly. While at first the idea of a Scottish essence seemed to promise the spiritual foundation MacDiarmid was seeking, as his poetry developed this idea became less important and he came to see poetry as an unrealizable ideal.

This reading of MacDiarmid's poetry, relating it to the modernist movement, will be of value to readers interested in twentieth-century literature.