“When MacDiarmid spoke of “Synthetic Scots” he merely referred to another aspect of this necessary revolution; that we should forget the whole poverty-stricken “dialect” tradition that Burns and his immediate predecessors had been unconsciously responsible for, and use again all the rich resources of the language as Dunbar and the Makars had used it, as had Burns and Fergusson, Scott, Galt, Stevenson and George Douglas Brown.”