Last laugh for a bard

And there, on page 596 of volume one and page 54 of volume two, right among his global peers - Bertolt Brecht, Andre Breton, James Joyce, Anna Ahkmatova, Ezra Pound, Pablo Neruda, William Carlos Williams and all - is the Lucky Poet himself: a stretch from A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle, and The Glass of Pure Water, where MacDiarmid makes his infamous ''call to the Celt''.

The American editors include him ''in the company of the great modernists'', rather than leave him as ''a quaintly local Scottish poet/thinker'', because of the ambition of his work from the mid-thirties onwards. MacDiarmid's shift, note the editors, from a poetry of dialect to a poetry of philosophical, scientific and political themes - a ''rugged and open ended (if at times rambling) 'poetry of fact' '' - reflects a ''width of concern'' comparable with Ezra Pound.

Strange to know how to react to this. If he were still huffing and puffing, no doubt Mr Grieve would be, as usual, where the extremes meet. He'd be quietly chuffed, perhaps, that his strenous efforts to place Scottish culture at the heart of modernity - and you don't get more modernistic than the University of California - was finally deemed a success at the end of this century. But he might also be fizzing audibly - that the literary lickspittles of the American imperium would only allow him entry to the canon on the basis of him having ''outgrown'' his ''quaintly local'' Scotticisms.

That's the fun thing about imagining MacDiarmid's reactions on any matter.

In a contrarious era, where all

categories of knowledge and practice seem to be in permanent meltdown, his intellectual rebelliousness seems more relevant than ever. This is not, to be sure, the accepted current line: when Irvine Welsh says: ''Hugh MacDiarmid represents everything I hate about Scottish culture and literature,'' you know exactly why.

The new Scottish writers are all about intense localism, corroded irony, an in-the-moment nihilism: their national culture becomes just another neighbourhood in the cosmopolis of their prose. For them, MacDiarmid is too strictly political (founder of the National Party of Scotland, connoisseur of militant ideologies from Stalinism to fascism); too artistically programmatic (his one-man construction of a ''synthetic Scots'', his take-no-prisoners approach to literary peers); too high-flown (his memoria to James Joyce, his hobnobbing with Ezra Pound). While they might share a mild, self-conscious version of his Anglophobia - remember Renton's ''we're so pathetic,we're colonised by wankers'' routine - they recoil at the militancy of his opposition to the ''English ascendancy''. And remember, say, the chemical generation, that he descrbed Alexander Trocchi - Our Ain National Junkie, friend of

the Situationists, slacker laureate - as ''cosmopolitan scum'' at the Edinburgh Festival in the sixties. Which makes MacDiarmid, by implication, parochial garbage: an embarrassment to all those multi-media-minded, slickly relevant content-providers for Scotland TM. Where's the film project in long verse meditations on the materiality of rocks, on an ''East-West synthesis'', on the kind of poetry that he wants?

Yet I'm beginning to think that Mac-Diarmid will have the last laugh on his modern detractors. Now that Stage One of his most heart-felt political project has been realised - a devolved Scottish Parliament - I predict that many of the debates and problematics that he identified will come roaring back to the forefront of cultural debate in this country. For his central theme - the worlding of a distinctively Scottish culture, to the benefit of both terms - is a theme shared by hundreds of small nations and regions, enduring the whirlwinds of globalisation. MacDiarmid's answers may often have been wrong, wildly wrong - but his initial questions were often correct.

There's no doubt that his advocacy of a ''Synthetic Scots'' will be reanimated in this new political context. Alastair Moffat's piece in this paper a few weeks ago, hoping for a consumer-led demand for more media to be voiced in Scots, is only picking up from a tendency evident to anyone: the way that a distinctively Scots vocabulary - adjectives, verbs, nouns - is beginning to stud the speeches of Scottish movers and shakers. This synthesizing can only come from a degree of political confidence: why use ''stubborn'' to describe Donald Dewar, when ''thrawn'' will do nicely?

Moffat presumes that a Scots language policy can only be about maintaining its survival in small local areas. But it's surely more likely that a Scottish Government seeking to articulate a Scottish policy agenda will want to do so in a vocabulary which immediately marks it off as distinctive from Westminster. Whether a Catalonian terminus is in sight - where Scotland functions, in its common linguistic medium, in Scots - we can't predict. But language, as MacDiarmid intuitively realised, is always the cheapest and most versatile building material of national identity.

MacDiarmid's work also anticipates what many have been calling the new ''third culture'', where science becomes a topic of mass interest. Many of his later poems - where his mission to ''fuse poetry and science'' was at its most militant - are indeed often simply long lists of technical explanation. MacDiarmid plunged headlong into physics, biology, metallurgy, psychology - versifying raw chunks

of method and analysis, making basic

science lyrical. ''It is with the poet as with a guinea worm'', he wrote in To A Friend and Fellow-Poet - ''who, to accommodate her teeming progeny/Sacrifices nearly every organ of her body . . .''

In the new Scotland, we'll properly debate the detailed arrangments of educational policy. But we must always remember those Scots who had a broader vision of how knowledge and learning could function in a small country - and who, recklessly and gloriously, tried to embody that in their own creations. An intellectual democracy, which Mac-Diarmid's great friend the philosopher George Davie argued for, is a national potential as yet unrealised. MacDiarmid's one-bard attempt to make that world a reality - by swallowing science, history, linguistics, all the expertise of the world into his bulging verse - deserves admiration, rather than contempt.

I came across the University of California books on the Web, and purchased them from the internet booksellers

Amazon.com. And of course Mac-Diarmid would have been on the Net! Indeed, he would probably be publishing there - revelling in the creative freedom and implicit globalism of the medium, its ability to evade all those cultural establishments who erect boundaries between areas of knowledge, its endless archives of fact and ideology only a click away from each other.

Apple MacDiarmid? Synthetic Scots as the new rock'n'roll? Remember, we're in a new era. Anything can happen.