MacLean once said that various Communist figures meant more to him than any poet, writing to Douglas Young in 1941 that "Lenin, Stalin and Dimitroff now mean more to me than Prometheus and Shelley did in my teens". Other left-wing figures that inspired MacLean included James Connolly, an Irish trade union leader executed for leading the Easter Rising; John Maclean, Scottish socialist and pacifist; and John Cornford, Julian Bell, and Federico García Lorca, who were killed by the Francoist regime during the Spanish Civil War. Many of these figures were not Gaels, and some critics have noted MacLean's unusual generosity to non-Gaelic people in his work. Perhaps the one uniting theme in his work is MacLean's anti-elitism and focus on social justice.