In his poem "John Maclean (1879-1923)", written in 1934 but only published later in the 1956 edition of "Stony Limits and Other Poems", Hugh MacDiarmid railed that "of all Maclean's foes not one was his peer" and described Maclean as "both beautiful and red" in his 1943 poem "Krassivy, Krassivy" This was the inspiration for the title of "Krassivy", a 1979 play by Glasgow writer Freddie Anderson. Maclean was eulogised as "the eagle o' the age" and placed in the Scottish pantheon alongside Thomas Muir and William Wallace by Sydney Goodsir Smith in his "Ballant O John Maclean". In 1948, MacDiarmid and Smith (among others) gave readings at a "huge mass meeting" at St. Andrew's Hall in Glasgow, organised by the Scottish-USSR Society to mark the 25th Anniversary of his death. The Scottish Esperanto poet and novelist John Islay Francis (1924-2012) in his novel "La Granda Kaldrono" ("The Big Cauldron") published in 1978, describes different attitudes toward the first and the second world wars. Among the characters, John Maclean is the only actual one, and has an important role.