WHEN Hugh MacDiarmid died in 1978, leaving undetected mines across a country he often gave the impression he would love to blow to smithereens, it was left to Norman MacCaig to sum him up. “He would walk into my mind as if it were a town and he a torchlight procession of one,” said MacCaig, on the dreich Langholm day on which MacDiarmid’s funeral was held, “lighting up the streets of my mind and some of the nasty little things that were burrowing into the corners.”

When MacCaig died, 20 years ago this week, aged 85, the obituaries were fittingly generous but none was metaphorically up to the standard he himself had set. There was a sense though that with his passing the tectonic plates of our literature had shifted and that a new, prose-driven era was about to be ushered in. MacCaig was the last of the poets who were to be found in the smoke-fugged howffs of Edinburgh’s Rose Street.

Sidney Goodsir Smith, underrated still, checked out in 1975, having done, in MacDiarmid’s intemperate estimation, in his rambunctious, now out-of-print novel, Carotid Cornucopius “for Edinburgh no less successfully what Joyce did for Dublin”. Six years later it was Robert Garioch’s turn at the gates of Parnassus. The capital’s unofficial makar, Garioch had the air of a fly on the wall, tuning in to the buzz to which he was a sparing contributor. I used often to see him in the Central Library’s reference department where, sucking surreptitiously on a toffee, he would comb through the reviews in the Times Literary Supplement with the barely containable excitement of a child greedily consuming the Beano.

MacCaig stood out from his fellow poets not only because he was at least a head taller than any of them but because he chose not to write in Scots. Instead he wrote in the purist possible English, clarity of expression and meaning being his avowed ambition. His poems are invariably pithy and as such easy to dismiss. His ostensible subjects were likewise modest. He loved all animals and if, say, there was a prize for the best poem about frogs or earwigs or daddylonglegs (“with too much leg and not enough wing/the daddylonglegs helicopters/about the room”) he would be the runaway winner.

But as the years have passed appreciation of MacCaig’s poems has deepened and his reputation shows no sign of decline. He is the poet I turn to most often, for amusement, for consolation, for a reminder of what sorts wheat from chaff. His son Ewen, in a preface to The Poems of Norman MacCaig, first published in 2005, estimated that his father wrote about 3,900 poems during his “forty-five years of mature production”. Of these, around 1,100 survived. “The missing 2,800 were not good enough, so he destroyed them.”

How that compares to other poets’ rejection ratio I don’t know. But what one can say is that MacCaig set his personal bar very high. What inspired him, what prompted him to write a poem, was a moment of inspiration or a memory that he wanted to memorialise. Unlike MacDiarmid, he did not seek revolution or the kind of reaction that prompts people to rush to barricades. How he stood politically was a matter for some speculation. It has been assumed he was sympathetic to the SNP but did he vote for it?

Nor, of course, does it matter. What is important is that he produced a body of work that transcends time and place and finds new readers in every generation. It is worth remembering, for example, that for the likes of Seamus Heaney, MacCaig was synonymous with poetry. That he did not receive the garlands Heaney and others did is a mystery. Similarly, one wonders why there is such a dearth of good books about him and his circle. There is no biography of him, for instance, as, indeed, there is none for Goodsir Smith and Garioch. MacDiarmid is less neglected but the last biography of him, Alan Bold’s, appeared nearly 30 years ago. None of which would bother MacCaig for whom the making of a poem was an end in itself. Often, he said mischievously, he would write one and a few hours later couldn’t remember anything about it. “Not a single thing. I have to look it up.”