Christopher Murray Grieve, who went on to write under the name Hugh MacDiarmid and a plethora of other pseudonyms, reacted enthusiastically to Ulysses and The Waste Land in 1922. Both works were important to his poetry. Again, he relished Wallace Stevens' Harmonium in 1924, and, whether as a reviewer for the New Age or for many other periodicals, he inveighed against ‘provinciality of outlook’ and was alert to the developments of international modernism. My chapter starts with those reminders, because most of it will deal with MacDiarmid's particular location in small-town Scotland. There, without at all renouncing international concerns, he matured in various areas of his work through an interaction with the minutely local. He fused the immediate and vernacular with the transnational and synthetic practices of modernist writing. In so doing, he can be seen as developing an exemplary aesthetic of the local–international that is in some ways as bound up with participation in the events of a small community as is the work of Robert Burns.