I still know some of MacDiarmid's poems by heart, from when I was in Scotland in 1959 and the Scottish Nationalist students were enamored of him; so if memorable speech makes a poet, he was a poet. He was also a Marxist Christian mystic, and something of an impostor. One of his poems that I learned turned out not to be his, but to be a snatch of somebody else's prose broken into lines. After that came to light, it transpired that even the breaking into lines had already been done by someone else.

--- Joe Fineman    joe_f@verizon.net

||: In German there are no regular nouns, and in psychology there are no normal minds. :||