Hugh MacDiarmid was the pseudonym of Christopher Murray Grieve, the pre-eminent Scottish modernist poet, and leading proponent of the interwar “Scottish Literary Renaissance.” His best-known work is A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), an extended stream-of-consciousness monologue in Scots verse. MacDiarmid was also an editor, critic, essayist, and polemicist. Rejecting what he saw as the stagnancy of the Scottish imagination under the ascendency of the canon of English literature, he promoted a revived Scots poetry that would reconnect with contemporary movements in Europe. The slogan for the Scottish Chapbook, MacDiarmid’s monthly periodical, was “Not traditions—precedents!”