Regarded as the single most important poem of the twentieth-century Scottish literary revival, the poem launched the “Scottish Renaissance”.

In this anthology over 70 writers from around the world reflect on the influence of the poem in prose and verse, exploring the poem’s language, structure and imagery, its power and its provocations.

What is the place of A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle in the twenty-first century? Who reads it, and does it still cause strong reactions?

Today’s flourishing Scots language movement owes much to MacDiarmid whose ‘synthetic Scots’ proved the language could carry Dostoevskian philosophy, sexual longing, cosmic speculation, and political rage in the same breath as a drunk man’s maundering by a thistle.

It effectively re-legitimised Scots as a medium for high literary ambition after a long nineteenth-century slide into “Kailyard” whimsy.

Politically and culturally, the poem is inseparable from the nationalist and socialist currents MacDiarmid himself championed – he co-founded the National Party of Scotland not long after writing it. The poem’s central image, the thistle itself, becomes a meditation on Scottish self-division, inferiority, drink culture, and the tension between provincialism and cosmopolitan ambition.

Ayont the Thistle: A gallimaufry of poetry and prose to mark the centenary of Hugh MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. Eds James Robertson, Alan Riach and Jim Mackintosh. Published by Tippermuir Books Limited, 360pp, £11.99