Caledonian Antisyzygy For Beginners

Hugh MacDiarmid was a man possessed of a quite extraordinary turn of vituperative phrase with which to disembowel his enemies. He referred to fellow poet, Edwin Muir as "a leader of the white-mouse faction of the Anglo-Scottish literati and a paladin in mental fight with the presence of a Larry the Lamb". But that was mild compared to the bile-filled attack on "the whole gang of high mucky-mucks, famous fatheads, old wives of both sexes, stuffed shirts, hollow men with headpieces stuffed with straw, bird-wits, lookers-under-beds, trained seals, creeping Jesuses, Scots Wha Ha'evers, village idiots, policemen, leaders of white mouse factions and noted connoisseurs of bread and butter, glorified gangsters, and what 'Billy' Phelps called Medlar novelists (the medlar being a fruit that becomes rotten before it is ripe), Commercial Calvinists, makers of 'noises like a turnip', and all the touts and toadies and lickspittles of the English Ascendancy, and their infernal women-folk, and all their skunkoil skulduggery". That's poetry In fact, as famous fathead and hollow man with headpiece stuffed with straw, Paul Daniels, might say, "That's Magic !"