a wall plaque was erected in 1927 in St. Mary's Roman Catholic cemetery in Arisaig "by a few Jacobite admirers in New Zealand and some fellow clansmen at home, in recognition of his greatness as a Gaelic poet". Literary and cultural legacy Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair may be said to rank first among all the bards of the Scottish Gaels, perhaps with only Sorley MacLean, of more recent fame, as an exception. He "owed little or nothing either to his predecessors or his contemporaries" in the field of poetry and many of his poems are available in anthologies of Scottish poetry. According to Alan Riach, Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair's high level of education, his ability to read and write in his own language, and his multilingual understanding of the Western canon from Classical literature to the time of the French and Scottish Enlightenments, is what sets him apart from the other truly great Gaelic poets of the era. According to Derrick S. Thomson, "He was a man of strong views and violent emotions but with a hard intellectual cast of mind also; he was learned in the Gaelic tradition and open to influence from his other reading; he was an innovator and a conservative; and his poetry is full of the stimulating contradictions that proceed from these diversities." Long before legendary Canadian Gaelic poet Iain mac Ailein, the former Bard to the 15th Chief of Clan Maclean of Coll, emigrated with his family from Tiree to Nova Scotia in 1819, Iain mac Ailein was only one of many Gaelic-speaking Seanchaidhe who could recite the entirety of Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair's immram poem Birlinn Chloinne Raghnaill ("The Birlinn of Clanranald"), from memory. Furthermore, Iain mac Ailein also carried with him when he emigrated an extremely rare first edition copy of the Clanranald Bard's Ais-eridh na Sean Chánoin Albannaich. In 1915, MacLean's grandson, Presbyterian minister Rev. Alexander MacLean Sinclair, donated his grandfather's copy of the book to St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. In a letter to the university's Rector, Rev. Hugh P. MacPherson, Rev. Sinclair apologized for having razored out everything between pages 152 and 161, which he called, "abominably filthy". These pages had contained two of Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair's most famous works of erotic poetry; Moladh air Deagh Bhod ("In Praise of a Good Penis") and Tineas na h-Urchaid ("The Venereal Disease"). Including the copy that was