Grieve, Christopher Murray (Hugh MacDiarmid)

1892 - 1978
Poet

Born in Langholm in Dumfriesshire on 11 August 1892 Christopher Murray Grieve is justly regarded as one of the giants of Scottish literature. Best known under his pseudonym Hugh MacDiarmid he led the Scottish Renaissance movement and promoted the use of Scots as a poetic language.

The first son of Elizabeth Grieve and her postman husband James, he was educated at Langholm Academy before becoming a pupil teacher at Broughton Higher Grade School in Edinburgh.

He then turned to journalism and worked in Scotland and Wales until joining the army during the First World War and serving in France and Greece as a member of the Royal Army Medical Corps.

After the war he settled in Montrose with his first wife Peggy Skinner and worked as an editor and reporter for the Montrose Review. While there he also edited literary magazines and anthologies of Scottish writing including The Scottish Chapbook which also featured his own poetry. It was in the Chapbook that the name Hugh MacDiarmid first appeared.

In 1923 his first book Annals of the Five Senses was published. Three years later in 1926 he published his epic poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, arguably his finest work.

Other early works include the poem To Circumjack Cencrastus (1930) and First Hymn to Lenin (1931), a poem which is said to have deeply influenced a number of English poets including WH Auden and Cecil Day Lewis.

Grieve was as passionate about politics as he was of literature and his beliefs run through his work. A founder member of the National Party of Scotland (the forerunner to the Scottish National Party) he was also a communist and stood as a Communist candidate in 1964.

He was also a passionate advocate of Scottish culture while deploring Scottish provincialism. In the words of his biographer Alan Bold Grieve was a "nationalist with a poor opinion of the nation he lived in." He was also, according to Bold, the "poetic voice of the nation."

A prolific writer he published more than 30 books in his lifetime. He was married twice and had three children, two with his first wife Peggy and one with his second wife Valda Trevlyn. He died on 9 September 1978 and was buried in his hometown of Langholm.