Gibbon was a close friend: they collaborated on a polemical book about Scotland. Trocchi had a famous spat with him at a conference organised by Calder, MacDiarmid calling him “cosmopolitan scum”, but they wrote to one another and became unlikely friends. Pound and he met only once, but got on very well; MacDiarmid said that he loved Pound. Buchan was a colleague, Yeats was met in Ireland, while Eliot turned down as uncommercial a long poem MacDiarmid submitted for publication. MacDiarmid described the 18-year-old Finlay as “very delightful”, but later turned against him.