Revolutionary Art of the Future

re-discovered poems

MacDiarmid Hugh

"The Revolutionary Art of the Future" is a selection from three hundred poems by Hugh MacDiarmid discovered by John Manson in the archives of the National Library of Scotland in 2003. This is the first time many of them have appeared in print.

The range of subjects and moods is extraordinary: poems in Scots and English, provocative poems on sexuality and marriage, satires on the hypocrisy of the Church and bourgeois complacency, comic squibs and powerful indictments of the brutality of imperialism and its consequences in war. MacDiarmid celebrates the power of derisive laughter and the poetic imagination to combat ignorance, prejudice and stupidity. Twenty-five years after his death, MacDiarmid's is still a truly dissenting voice, as shocking and necessary as ever.

About the Author

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. He became a founder-member of the Scottish National Party in 1928, and joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1934. He was expelled from both during the 1930s, although he rejoined the Communist Party in 1956. Between 1933 and 1942 he lived with his second wife in the Shetlands. In 1951 he settled with his family at Brownsbank, near Biggar, where he lived until his death in 1978.

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