Ah, this is my ambition indeed:
To rise up among the insipid, unsalted, rabbity, endlessly hoping people
And sing a great song of our Alba bheaddarrach
An exuberant, fustigating, truculent, polysyllabic
Generous, eccentric, and incomparably learned song
And so bring fresh laurels to deck the brows
Of Alba bheadarrach is Alba-nuadhaichte, ath-leasaichte, is ath-bheothaichte.

'My Ambition'
   

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.