The interwar phase of Scottish modernism appears to divide itself into two decades: the movement towards artistic renewal in the 1920s, and a more intense involvement with politics and social concerns – national and international – in the 1930s. In addition, while poetry is the dominant art form of the earlier decade, in the 1930s there is a significant amount of new fiction writing. In both decades, however, the principal writers contribute to the national and artistic renewal debate through critical and discursive prose as well as through their creative writing. The narrative of the movement, as presented here, is therefore a continuous one, led by aesthetic developments and the contexts from which they derived, rather than by any intentional chronological periodisation.

Just as poetry was the dominant literary activity of the 1920s, so poetry itself was dominated by MacDiarmid's revival of the Scots vernacular as a modern, avant-garde medium: ‘a vast storehouse of just the very peculiar and subtle effects which modern European literature in general is assiduously seeking’, as he claimed in the Scottish Chapbook of February 1923. As we have seen in the previous chapter, MacDiarmid's self-conversion to Scots was hard won and initially fiercely resisted. Edwin Muir may have incited the modern writer to ‘wrestle with his age’, but for MacDiarmid the struggle was less with modernity itself than with the outworn traditions of his country which seemed to him to be holding Scotland back from entering the modern world. In the literary context, the Scots language and the now debased poetry tradition of Burns were among these impediments.