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Born 11 August 1892, at Langholm in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, the elder son of James Grieve, postman, and his wife, Elizabeth, daughter of Andrew Graham, farmhand, of Waterbeck. He was educated at Langholm Academy, and his first published poem appeared in the Eskdale and Liddesdale Advertiser while he was in his teens. During a spell as a pupil-teacher in Edinburgh, he joined the Edinburgh branches of the Independent Labour Party and the Fabian Society. After working on various newspapers in Scotland and south Wales, he joined the army in July 1915, rising through the ranks to become a sergeant. In 1916 he was posted to the RAMC in Salonika from where he sent home poems to be read and judged by one of his previous schoolmasters; he contracted malaria and in 1918 he was invalided home. In June 1918 he married Margaret Cunningham Thompson Skinner (Peggy) (died 1962), a one-time colleague on the Fife Herald. They were to have a son and a daughter.
The end of the war found him in an Indian hospital in Marseilles, from which he was demobilized in July 1919. His first book, Annals of the Five Senses (1923), largely consisted of poems written in Salonika. After the war Grieve worked as a journalist, largely on the Montrose Review, and became widely known as the editor of three successive anthologies of current Scottish poetry called Northern Numbers (1920, 1921, and 1922).
From 1920 onwards a movement was started towards the revival of Scots as a literary medium. At first Grieve resisted this, believing it to be a ?backwater?, but he finally started to experiment with it, assuming the pen-name of Hugh MacDiarmid. He employed a literary Scots based largely on the speech of his native countryside, but also using and reviving words from the Scots poets and prose writers of the past. In this medium he wrote the beautiful short lyrics of Sangschaw (1925) and Penny Wheep (1926), but his most notable use of it is in his long poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926). His method is best described in his own words: ?a long poem split up into several sections, but the forms within the sections range from ballad measure to vers libre. The matter includes satire, amphigouri, lyrics, parodies of Mr. T. S. Eliot and other poets, and translations from the Russian, French and German. The whole poem is in braid Scots, and it has been expressly designed to show that braid Scots can be effectively applied to all manner of subjects and measures? (1925). Hand in hand with this interest in Scots went his involvement with Scottish nationalist politics. When the National Party of Scotland was formed in 1927-8, Grieve was very active in encouraging it, and he became a founder member in 1928, but was expelled in 1933. He was a Labour member of the Montrose Town Council and a JP. He moved to Liverpool and London, becoming in 1928 editor of the short-lived radio journal Vox.
In 1932 his first marriage ended in divorce, and in 1934 he married a Cornishwoman, Valda Trevlyn Rowlands, who had borne him a son two years previously. After a brief spell in East Lothian, in 1933 they moved to Whalsay, a small remote island in the Shetlands, where they lived until Grieve was called up for war work, first in a factory, and later in the merchant navy. Grieve joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1934, but four years later was expelled for ?national deviation?. The long poems written during this period, which include two ?Hymns to Lenin? (1931 and 1935), are composed in a mixture of Scots and English, but during the later part of his life his poems are largely written in English. He continued his political involvement, standing as an Independent Scottish Nationalist candidate for Kelvingrove in 1945. In Who's Who he listed his recreation as ?Anglophobia?. In 1957 he rejoined the Communist Party and was the communist candidate for Kinross in 1964. In 1950 he visited Russia with members of the Scottish-USSR Friendship Society, and in the same year was awarded a Civil List pension; he went to China in 1956 as a member of the delegation of the British-Chinese Friendship Society. During this time he moved to the cottage in Biggar, Lanarkshire, where he lived until his death.
In 1957 an honorary LL D was conferred upon him by the University of Edinburgh, and in the following year he was presented with the Andrew Fletcher Saltoun medal for ?service to Scotland?. He was also honorary RSA. As part of the Robert Burns bicentenary celebrations in 1959 he visited Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary. In 1976 he was elected president of the Poetry Society of Great Britain. His most sustained work in prose is Lucky Poet: A Self-study in Literature and Political Ideas, Being the Autobiography of Hugh MacDiarmid (Christopher Murray Grieve) (1943); this also includes a ?Third Hymn to Lenin?. He died in hospital in Edinburgh 9 September 1978.
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