Penny Wheep.

Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons Ltd,, 1926. First edition, first impression, of MacDiarmid's second collection of Scots poetry. The pre-eminent literary figure of the 20th-century Scottish Renaissance, Hugh MacDiarmid, born Christopher Murray Grieve (1892-1978), is as well-known for his Scottish nationalist and communist politics as for his literary output. In the present collection and throughout the 1920s, he developed a "synthetic Scots" that drew on a variety of dialects and relied on Scots dictionaries rather than everyday speech, in an effort to create a unified, national literary language. "The anti-British gesture of recovering a Scottish voice – and subsequently a Scottish culture and politics – is the nationalist root of MacDiarmid's synthetic Scots", and his style "is no reactionary backward step, but a modernist stance that draws on a populist tradition... in order to radically refashion the cultural and political state of the nation" (Lyall, pp. 8 & 95). During the 1930s, however, he shifted to writing most of his poetry in English because he considered the Scots vernacular unsuitable for the subjects that he increasingly focused on: metaphysical speculation, Marxist philosophy, and science. The front cover declares that "Mr M'Diarmid is one of the very few genuine poets who have used the medium of the Scots doric within the last 130 years. He intermingles in a daring fashion words that still haunt the lips of ploughmen and fisher-lads. In doing so he has revivified the body of Scots poetry, and put the spark of hope into its almost moribund heart". Octavo. Original blue cloth, spine and front cover lettered in gilt, Celtic knot in gilt and double rules in blind to front cover. With dust jacket. Christmas 1926 gift inscription to one Missia on front free endpaper. Spine ends bumped, extremities rubbed, gilt remaining bright, contents fresh and clean. A very good copy in like dust jacket, spine and edges browned, spine ends nicked, edges rubbed. Scott Lyall, Hugh MacDiarmid's Poetry and Politics of Place, 2006.