Complete Poems

The first volume of this two-volume edition of MacDiarmid's Complete Poems reprints the texts of the Penguin edition (1986), which was based on the first edition of 1978, which MacDiarmid himself saw through the press. Additional poems discovered since the first edition of 1978 are included, and the additional text revised.

W. R. Aitken was a scholar librarian - friend and bibliographer to Hugh MacDiarmid. Michael Grieve, the son of Christopher Murray Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid), was a journalist and editor on newspapers and a television producer and editor. He was Vice-Chairman of the Scottish National Party. Michael Grieve died in 1995. 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.