"This book examines the use made of the Scots tongue by over a century of splendid poets. Beginning with Logic Robertson and Robert Louis Stevenson, who rescued Scots poetry from its nineteenth-century doldrums, it proceeds through the increasingly confident use of archaic varieties, local dialects and the traditional literary language to the MacDiarmid revolution; discusses the high-water mark of the Scots Renaissance as represented by such masters as Goodsir Smith, Robert Garioch and the two Scotts, and concludes with an examination of the ever more adventurous experiments in Scots by the younger generation of poets. Scots is also considered as a European minority language, and its use as a symbol of Scottish political and cultural nationalism by MacDiarmid and his successors in examined and discussed."--BOOK JACKET.