Henderson repels MacDiarmid's attacks on the then flourishing Scottish folk revival. Evoking the poet's reference to Antonio Gramsci in his recent work and, by asserting that the celebrated Italian Communist possessed values at odds with those projected by MacDiarmid in the on-going debates, Henderson used his understanding of the political philosopher to promote his own agenda and discredit his opponent's. The flytings are a condensed account of Henderson's cultural politics, concentrated and sharpened in the pattern of accusation and rebuttal. Yet, Gramsci comes to represent the contested ground. After MacDiarmid himself, the Sardinian thinker is perhaps the figure most frequently invoked throughout Henderson's disparate writings.

Henderson first discovered Gramsci in Northern Italy in 1944, whilst serving as an Officer in the Intelligence Corps. The Communist partisans of the Italian Resistenza introduced Henderson to a hero, martyr, journalist, agitator, co-founder and former Secretary General of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). They told Henderson of the hardships of Gramsci's life, his incarceration in Mussolini's prisons, his ill health and his consequent death at only forty-six. They also made the young officer aware of the growing reputation, which had already taken root on a local level, of Gramsci as un grande pensatore, that is, ‘a great thinker’ (AM, pp. 339–44). Following the success of his Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica (1948) Henderson spent the period 1948–51 translating Gramsci's Lettere dal Carcere (‘The Prison Letters’). The enduring influence of this period of intense scholarly activity is apparent throughout Henderson's later work as a complex of explicit references to, and implicit invocations of, Gramsci's life and thought.