Hugh MacDiarmid: The Poetry of the ``Metaphysical Revolt''

The work of the modernist poet Hugh MacDiarmid, famous for his Scots poems and his political commitment of the mid-20th century, is rarely ever considered in relation to the religious or the divine. Although a declared atheist, the Scottish poet nonetheless kept talking about God in his poems, lamenting God's death in verse combining regret and anger. His poems, still heavily suffused with Judaeo-Christian metaphysics, voice the type of incomplete nihilism theorised by Nietzsche in The Gay Science (1882). This article explores the ways MacDiarmid's poetry directly confronts the divine and the concepts usually associated with it. This confrontation may be expressed in lexical forms, or take the shape of poetic catalogues which seek to render the immanence of - a detheologised infinite, to challenge godly perfection, and to reveal that poetic form can become the very place for metaphysical rebellion to materialise.