Henderson was familiar with the frustration MacDiarmid expresses in this poem. Lamenting the isolation of the artist in modern society, he sought to overcome this ‘distance’ between the poet and ‘the people’, and he felt that much could be learned from the folk tradition in achieving this end. These few lines of MacDiarmid's speak to the scale and the difficulty of the task that Henderson set himself: to represent the voices (and lives) of the soldiers of the Second World War; to achieve that confluence of theory and practice that he so admired in Gramsci; to relinquish his own poetic agency to Anon.; to represent and extend a radical national tradition; and to reconcile the perspectives of the folklorist and the revivalist with the unbounded folk tradition. The fact that no fixed, or final position is reached in Henderson's lifelong engagement with these ideas is testament to his intellectual rigour. Even where it suits Henderson's agenda to treat complex notions of orality or the folk tradition as though they were simple and uncontested, he leaves ample room for these doubts.

MacDiarmid is the victor in their flytings because his terms are unequivocal. The base desire for, and vulgar pleasures of folk culture sit in sharp contrast to the cool disinterestedness of philosophic inquiry and poetic truth. This debate raged during the eighteenth-century ballad revival and the same opposition is played out between the intellectual vanguard of the Scottish Literary Renaissance and the central theorist and strategist behind the modern folk revival. Where MacDiarmid claims the rhetorical high ground of critical distance, Henderson writes of dissolving himself in the process he champions. MacDiarmid rejects his opponent's criticisms outright based on this vaunted revelation, that the ideal they have in common can never, has never and will never, be met. Henderson's work always allows for the possibility, though it also seeks out the fissures and gaps in the theories it posits.