Baglow shows that this search for justification was a focus for MacDiarmid almost from the start, but that it was only with his development of "synthetic Scots" that he begin to grapple with it directly. While at first the idea of a Scottish essence seemed to promise the spiritual foundation MacDiarmid was seeking, as his poetry developed this idea became less important and he came to see poetry as an unrealizable ideal. This reading of MacDiarmid's poetry, relating it to the modernist movement, will be of value to readers interested in twentieth-century literature.