Scottish Poems

Scottish poetry has a long and distinguished history in both English and Gaelic, stretching back into the Middle Ages. Its characteristic marks are energy, wit, satire and-especially in Gaelic - passionate lyrical intensity. Most readers of English poetry are familiar with Irish writing in English, less so with Scots. This volume will add a whole new dimension to their experience of the unparalleled heritage of great poetry produced in these islands. The collection contains all the poets everyone has heard of - Burns, Stevenson, MacDiarmid,Henryson, Scott, Drummond of Hawthornden - and many more beside, including writers from the current renaissance in Scottish poetry. There are many old friends here and many new delights.

Scotland has produced poetry that is patriotic, that paints landscapes, people and situations, that speaks to personal matters, and those equally everyday matters pertaining to the mind and to the spirit. The Christian heritage of Scotland has been played out in verse, through Celtic devotional works, Catholic works, and Protestant works.

Scotland, like so many other nations, has produced poetry that is patriotic, that paints landscapes, people and situations, that speaks to personal matters, and those equally everyday matters pertaining to the mind and to the spirit. The Christian heritage of Scotland has long been played out in verse, through Celtic devotional works, Catholic works, Protestant works, and not forgetting satires on the Puritanism in Scotland's post-Reformation identity. Language and culture have been equally multifarious in the nation so that three major languages: Scots, English and Gaelic (examples of which are translated in this anthology) compete and co-exist in poetry. The fifteenth century poet, William Dunbar, joked that there was no music in hell except for the bagpipes, and there speaks something of the historic lowland attitude to the Gaidhealtachd (Gaelic speaking Scotland, principally the highlands). Hostility and eventual harmony is a marker of the Scottish highlands/lowlands divide as much as for that between Scotland and England. Historic tension is not to be dismissed but, certainly, the poetic palette of Scotland is one of multilingual richness, and shows an enduringly high quality whatever the cultural vicissitudes that play a part. The medieval Makars, most prominently Robert Henryson, William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas, are often taken to represent a golden age when poetry in Scots ran the full range of mood, mode and subject matter. If this has, perhaps, never been bettered, the sixteenth century lyrics and sonnets of Alexander Montgomerie, Alexander Scott and other poets around the court of James VI, and the eighteenth century vernacular 'revival' of Allan Ramsay, Alexander Ross, Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns represent at points equally brilliant periods; and the twentieth century 'modern renaissance' of Hugh MacDiarmid, Violet Jacob and William Souter proved that Scots remained a viable poetic currency, as a living poet such as Tom Leonard continues to demonstrate.
Poetry in Gaelic too has its tradition of peaks where the flame seems to burn more visibly at certain...