Scottish Poetry as World Poetry

This chapter will chart how, throughout history, Scotland’s poets have played a pivotal role in international developments in poetry. It will offer a chronological overview of the global reception of Scottish verse, but will focus primarily on the translation, diffusion, and literary impact of the following major figures and movements: George Buchanan and the Renaissance Neo-Latinists and their influence on European poetic drama, verse satire, and the religious lyric; James Thomson’s The Seasons and the birth of nature poetry; ‘The Homer of the North’: Ossian, Primitivism, and Pre-Romanticism; Herder’s promotion of Scots balladry as Volkspoesie; Byron, Scott, and Romanticism in Europe and the Americas; the nineteenth-century discovery of Robert Burns and his impact in Eastern Europe, China, and Japan; MacDiarmid, Muir, and twentieth-century cultural nationalism; the post-1980 international revival of interest in Scottish poetry (with particular reference to Kenneth White, Norman MacCaig, Douglas Dunn, and George Mackay Brown); the emergence of Scottish Studies and growing appreciation of Scotland’s trilingual verse tradition; the belated discovery of the Gaelic tradition via Sorley Maclean and Derrick Thomson. The chapter will also examine why, with the exception of Burns and MacDiarmid, verse in Scots has largely failed to achieve a global profile.