The Revolutionary Art of the Future is a selection from three hundred
poems by Hugh MacDiarmid discovered by John Manson in the archives of
the National Library of Scotland in 2003. This is the first time many of
them have appeared in print.
The range of subjects and moods is extraordinary: poems in Scots and
English, provocative poems on sexuality and marriage, satires on the
hypocrisy of the Church and bourgeois complacency, comic squibs and
powerful indictments of the brutality of imperialism and its
consequences in war. MacDiarmid celebrates the power of derisive
laughter and the poetic imagination to combat ignorance, prejudice and
stupidity. Twenty-five years after his death, MacDiarmid's is still a
truly dissenting voice, as shocking and necessary as ever.