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The Great Scots

The Lake Poets

William Blake (1757- 1827) was an English poet, painter and printmaker. Though largely unrecognised during his lifetime, today Blake's work, produced in partnership with his wife Catherine, is almost universally considered that of a genius. In recent years, a memorial was erected for him and his wife. Blake saw visual art and poetry as companions in a unified spiritual endeavour, and they are inseparable in a proper appreciation of his work. His life is, perhaps, summed up by his statement that " The imagination is not a State: it is the Human existence itself".

Blake was born in London into a middle class family. The Bible was an early and profound influence on Blake, and would remain a crucial source of inspiration throughout his life. From a young age Blake saw visions. The earliest certain instance was when he was at the age of about eight or ten he saw a tree filled with angels.He returned home and reported this vision, and only escaped a thrashing from his father by the intervention of his mother.

In 1779, Blake became a student at the Royal Academy. There, he rebelled against what he regarded as the unfinished style of fashionable painters such as Rubens, championed by the school's first president, Joshua Reynolds. Blake came to detest Reynold's attitude to art, especially his pursuit of " general truth" and " general beauty". Blake believed " to generalise is to be an idiot; to particularize is alone the distinction of merit".

After his father's death, William and his brother Robert opened a print shop in 1784 and began working with radical publisher Joseph Johnson. At Johnson's house he met some of the leading intellectual dissidents of the time in England, including Mary Wollstonecraft, an early feminist; and Thomas Paine, American revolutionary. Along with William Wordsworth, Blake had great hopes for the American and French revolution and wore a red liberty cap in solidarity with the French revolutionaries, but was disappointed with the rise of Robespierre and the Reign of Terror in the French revolution.

Mary Wollstonecraft became his close friend, and Blake illustrated her Original Stories from Real Life (1788). They shared similar views on sexual equality and the institution of marriage. In the Visions of the Daughters of Albion in 1793 Blake condemned the cruel absurdity of enforced chastity and marriage without love and defended the right of women to complete self-fulfillment.

In 1788 he started practicing with illuminated printing, (öâåòíàÿ ïå÷àòü); Blake used illuminated printing for four of his works: the Songs of Innocence and Experience, The Book of Thel, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Jerusalem.

Blake abhorred slavery and believed in racial and sexual equality. Several of his poems and paintings express a notion of universal humanity: " As all men are alike (tho' infinitely various)". He retained an active interest in social and political events for all his life, but was often forced to resort to cloaking social idealism and political statements in protestant mystical allegory. Blake rejected all forms of imposed authority; His spiritual beliefs are evidenced in Songs of Experience (in 1794), in which Blake showed his own distinction between the Old Testament God, whose restrictions he rejected, and the New Testament God (Jesus Christ), whom he saw as a positive influence. Blake thought that we have war, unjustice and unhappiness because our way of life is founded on mistaken beliefs. We cannot truly know reality through our five senses until we learn to trust our instincts, energies and imaginations. Many of his poems are called either visions or prophesies.

William Wordsworth, (1770 - 1850) was a major English romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their 1798 joint publication, Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth's masterpiece is generally considered to be The Prelude, an autobiographical poem. It contains some of Wordworth's most famous lines on the relation between the human mind and nature:

my voice proclaims

How exquisitely the individual Mind

(And the progressive powers perhaps no less

Of the whole species) to the external World

Is fitted: --and how exquisitely, too,

The external World is fitted to the Mind...

Wordsworth was England's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.

The second of five children, Wordsworth was born in Cumberland, part of the scenic region in northwest England called the Lake District. After their father's death, the Wordsworth children were left under the guardianship of their uncles. Although many aspects of his boyhood were positive, he recalled bouts of loneliness and anxiety. It took him many years, and much writing, to recover from the death of his parents and his separation from his siblings. Wordsworth attended St John's College, Cambridge in 1787. In 1790, he visited Revolutionary France and supported the Republican movement. The Reign of Terror put an end to his revolutionary enthusiasm.

1793 saw Wordsworth's first published poetry with the collections An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. That year, he also met Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Somerset. The two poets quickly developed a close friendship and together produced Lyrical Ballads (1798), an important work in the English Romantic movement.. One of Wordsworth's most famous poems, " Tintern Abbey, " was published in the work, along with Coleridge's " Ancient Mariner". This Preface to " Lyrical Ballads" is considered a central work of Romantic literary theory. In it, Wordsworth discusses what he sees as the elements of a new type of poetry, one based on the " real language of men" and which avoids the poetic diction of much eighteenth-century poetry. Here, Wordsworth also gives his famous definition of poetry as " the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings from emotions recollected in tranquility. "

He and his sister moved to Grasmere in the Lake District; a fellow poet Robert Southey settled nearby. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey came to be known as the " Lake Poets". Although in the later period many of his poems revolve around themes of death, endurance, separation, and grief, he is best remembered for his descriptions of Nature. All in all he wrote 523 sonnets, many of which can compare to Shakespeare for their excellence.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772- 1834) was an English poet, critic, and philosopher who was, along with his friend William Wordsworth, one of the founders of the Romantic Movement in England and as one of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as his major prose work Biographia Literaria.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Ottery St Mary, the son of a vicar. After the death of his father, he was sent to Christ's Hospital, a boarding school in London. In later life, Coleridge idealised his father as a pious innocent, but his relationship with his mother was difficult. His childhood was characterised by attention-seeking, which has been linked with his dependent personality as an adult

At the university he met political and theological ideas then considered radical. He left Cambridge without a degree and joined the poet Robert Southey in a plan, soon abandoned, to found a utopian communist-like society, called pantisocracy, in the wilderness of Pennsylvania. In 1795 the two friends married sisters Sarah and Edith Fricker, but Coleridge's marriage proved unhappy. Around 1796, Coleridge started using opium as a pain reliever.The years 1797 and 1798, during which the friends lived in Nether Stowey, Somerset, were among the most fruitful of Coleridge's life. Besides the Ancient Mariner, he composed the symbolic poem Kubla Khan, written, Coleridge himself claimed, as a result of an opium dream, in " a kind of a reverie" During this period he also produced his much-praised " conversation" poems This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, Frost at Midnight, and The Nightingale.

In the autumn of 1798 Coleridge and Wordsworth left for a stay in Germany; Coleridge soon went his own way and spent much of his time in university towns. During this period he became interested in German philosophy, especially the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant, Coleridge studied German and, after his return to England, translated the dramatic trilogy Wallenstein by the German Classical poet Friedrich Schiller into English.

In 1800 he returned to England and shortly thereafter settled with his family and friends at Keswick in the Lake District of Cumberland. Soon, however, he fell into a vicious circle of lack of confidence in his poetic powers, ill-health, and increased opium dependency.

Between 1808 and 1819 this " giant among dwarfs", as he was often considered by his contemporaries, gave a series of lectures in London and Bristol those on Shakespeare renewed interest in the playwright as a model for contemporary writers. Within this period, though, he was often accused of plagiarism, perhaps justifiably.

In 1816 Coleridge, he finished his major prose work, the Biographia Literaria (1817), a volume composed of 25 chapters of autobiographical notes and dissertations on various subjects, including some incisive literary theory and criticism. The sections in which Coleridge expounded his definitions of the nature of poetry and the imagination are particularly important: he made a famous distinction between primary and secondary imagination on the one hand and fancy on the other. “Primary imagination” is the living power and the main agent of human perception; “secondary” – poetic imagination which dissolves, diffuses in order to re-create. He, like Wordsworth, believed strongly in the importance of Nature: his sensitivity is evident in the descriptions of the natural world: colours, lights, sounds.

A statue of the Ancient Mariner at Watchet Harbour, Somerset, England, unveiled in September 2003 as a tribute to Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Ah! well a-day! what evil looks

Had I from old and young!

Instead of the cross, the Albatross

About my neck was hung.

Coleridge is probably best known for his long narrative poems, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel. Even those who have never read the Rime have come under its influence: its words have given the English language the metaphor of an albatross around one's neck, the (mis)quote of " water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink", and the phrase " a sadder but wiser man". “Christabel” is known for its musical rhythm and language and its Gothic tale. Kubla Khan, or, A Vision in a Dream, A Fragment, although shorter, is also widely known and loved. It has strange, dreamy imagery and can be read on many levels; both poems as having no rival due to their " exquisite metrical movement" and " imaginative phrasing."

One more historic legacy of Coleridge: the conversation poem became a standard vehicle for English poetic expression, and perhaps the most common approach among modern poets.

George Gordon (Noel) Byron, 6th Baron Byron (1788- 1824) was an Anglo-Scottish poet and leading figure in Romanticism. Among his best-known works are the narrative poems Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan. The latter remained incomplete on his death.

Byron's fame rests not only on his writings, but also on his life, which featured extravagant living, numerous love affairs, debts, separation, allegations of incest and sodomy and an eventual death from fever after he travelled to fight on the Greek side in the Greek War of Independence. He was famously described by Lady Caroline Lamb as " mad, bad, and dangerous to know."

Byron's parents separated before his birth. Lady Catherine moved back to Scotland shortly afterwards, where she raised her son in Aberdeen unti1798. He receved his formal education at Aberdeen Grammar School. In 1801 he was sent to Harrow, where he remained until 1805, when he proceeded to Trinity College, Cambridge.

Some early verses which he had published in 1806 were suppressed. They were followed in 1807 by Hours of Idleness, which was savagely attacked in the Edinburgh Review. In reply he sent forth English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), which created considerable stir and shortly went through 5 editions. In 1809 he left England, and passing through Spain, went to Greece.

During this absence from England, which extended over two years, he also wrote the first two cantos of Childe Harold, which were published after his return in 1812, and were received with acclamation. In his own words, " I awoke one morning and found myself famous." He followed up his success with some short poems, The Corsair, Lara, etc.

He eventually took his seat at the House of Lords in 1811, and made his first speech there on February 27, 1812. He was a strong advocate of social reform, and was particularly noted as one of the few Parliamentary defenders of the Luddites. He was also a defender of Roman Catholics. Byron was inspired to write political poems such as " Song for the Luddites" (1816) and " The Landlords' Interest" (1823). Examples of poems where he attacked his political opponents include " Wellington: The Best of the Cut-Throats" (1819) and " The Intellectual Eunuch Castlereagh" (1818).

Lord Byron had a reputation that still astonishes by its sheer brazenness and multiplicity. He was all-inclusive - boys, siblings, women of all classes. Ultimately he was to live abroad to escape the censure of British society, where men could be forgiven for sexual misbehavior only up to a point, one which Byron far surpassed.

In an early scandal, Byron embarked in 1812 on a well-publicised affair with Lady Caroline Lamb, whose madness and ruin he seems to have later accelerated. For his half-sister, Augusta Leigh, he wrote many passionate poems. She had been separated from her husband since 1811 when she gave birth on April 15, 1814 to a daughter, Medora. Byron's joy over the birth seems to substantiate the rumors of an incestuous relationship. Byron married Anne Isabella Milbanke (" Annabella"), a cousin of the Lady Caroline, who had refused him in the previous year.

In the summer of 1816 Lord Byron and his personal physician, John William Polidori settled in Switzerland, at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva. There he became friends with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Shelley's wife-to-be Mary Godwin. Probably inspired by this interesting company, Mary Shelley produced what would become “Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus” and Polidori was inspired by a fragmentary story of Byron's to produce “The Vampyre”, the progenitor of the romantic vampire genre. Byron's story fragment was published as a postscript to Mazeppa; he also wrote the third canto of Childe Harold. About the same time he published Manfred, Cain,. The first five cantos of Don Juan were written between.

Lord Byron being welcomed by Greeks.While living in Venice he helped to compile an Armenian grammar textbook and translated two of St. Paul's epistles into English.. When the representatives of the movement for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire contacted him to ask for his support, he accepted. On July 16, Byron left Genoa on the Hercules, arriving at Kefalonia in the Ionian Islands on August 2. He spent 4000 pounds of his own money to refit the Greek fleet, then sailed for Messolonghi in western Greece, arriving on December 29 to join Prince Alexandros Mavrokordatos, leader of the Greek rebel forces.

Mavrokordatos and Byron planned to attack the Turkish-held fortress of Lepanto, at the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth. Byron employed a fire-master to prepare artillery and took part of the rebel army under his own command and pay, despite his lack of military experience. But before the expedition could sail, on February 15, 1824, he fell ill, and the usual remedy of bleeding weakened him further. He made a partial recovery, but in early April he caught a violent cold which the bleeding -- insisted on by his doctors -- aggravated. The cold became a violent fever, and he died on April 19.

The Greeks mourned Lord Byron deeply, and he became a national hero. Viron, the Greek form of " Byron", continues in popularity as a masculine name in Greece, and a suburb of Athens is called Vironas in his honour. His body was embalmed and his heart buried under a tree in Messolonghi.

Don Juan, Byron's masterpiece, often called the epic of its time, has roots deep in literary tradition and, although regarded by early Victorians as somewhat shocking, equally involves itself with its own contemporary world at all levels - social, political, literary and ideological.

The Byronic hero pervades much of Byron's work. Scholars have traced the literary history of the Byronic hero from Milton, and many authors and artists of the Romantic movement show Byron's influence -- during the 19th century and beyond. The Byronic hero presents an idealised but flawed character whose attributes include:

rebelling

having a distaste for society and social institutions

suffering exile

expressing a lack of respect for rank and privilege

having great talent

hiding an unsavoury past

exhibiting great passion

ultimately, acting in a self-destructive manner

unsuccessful in love, usually the beloved is dead

His undying theme is always the insistence that people should be free to choose their own course in life. The most important element in his poetry is the narrator, a free and contradictory spirit whose tone changes continually ranging through the forceful, biting, sentimental, cynical, self-mocking and self-assured. The narrator maintains Byron’s scorn for what he called cant – the deceptions played by individuals and societies upon one another.

Today some 36 International Byron Societies function throughout the world, and an International Conference takes place annually. Hardly a year passes without a new book about the poet appearing. In the last 20 years two new feature films about him have screened, and a television play has been broadcast.

Byron exercised a marked influence on Continental literature and art, and his reputation as poet is higher in many European countries than in England or America, although not as high as in his time.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 - 1822) was one of the major English romantic poets and is esteemed by some scholars the finest lyric poet in the English language. He is perhaps most widely famous for such anthology pieces as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, and The Masque of Anarchy; but his major works were long visionary poems such as Adonais and Prometheus Unbound. He was also famous for his association with contemporaries John Keats and Lord Byron, and, like them, for his untimely death at a young age. He was married to the famous novelist Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein.

Shelley grew up in Sussex in a wealthy and politically influential family, and received his early education at home. In 1804, Shelley entered Eton College, and in 1810 went to the University of Oxford.

In 1811, Shelley published a pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism, which gained the attention of the school adminstration. His refusal to appear before the school's officials resulted in his expulsion. He could have been reinstated, following the intervention of his father, had he reconsidered his views. Shelley refused, which led to a total break between himself and his father.

Four months after being expelled, 19-year-old Shelley eloped to Scotland with 16-year-old schoolgirl Harriet Westbrook, daughter of a coffee-house keeper in London. After their marriage Shelley invited his college friend Hogg to share their household and also his wife, according to the ideals of free love. When Harriet objected, Shelley abandoned this first attempt at open marriage and brought Harriet instead to England's Lake District, intending to write.

Distracted by political events, he shortly afterwards visited Ireland to engage in radical pamphleteering. His activities earned him the unfavourable attention of the British government.

Over the next two years, Shelley wrote and published Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem, which attacked both political tyranny and conventional christianity The poem shows the influence of English philosopher William Godwin, and much of Godwin's freethinking radical philosophy is voiced in it. By now unhappy in his nearly three-year-old marriage, Shelley often left his wife and two children alone while he visited Godwin's home and bookshop in London. It was here that he met and fell in love with Mary, the intelligent and well-educated daughter of Godwin and famed feminist educator and writer Mary Wollstonecraft.

In July 1814, Shelley abandoned his wife and children and eloped for the second time. He and Mary sailed to Europe, crossed France and settled in Switzerland. After six weeks, homesick and destitute, the young people returned to England. There they found that Godwin, the one-time champion and practitioner of free love, refused to speak to Mary or Shelley.

At this point in his writing career, Shelley was deeply influenced by Wordsworth's poetry.

In the summer of 1816 Shelley and Mary, living now as a married couple, made an acquaintance with Byron. The Shelleys and Byron rented neighbouring houses on the shores of Lake Geneva. Regular conversation with Byron had an invigorating effect on Shelley's poetry. A boating tour which the two took together inspired Shelley to write the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, his first significant production " Mont Blanc", a difficult poem in which Shelley ponders questions of historical inevitability and the relationship between the human mind and external nature. In it, Shelley expressed his belief that spiritual truth was not based on either supernatural revelation or natural experience. Instead, he thought, truth can be achieved by imagination alone – the role of imagination is that of a spiritual guide.

Shelley, in turn, influenced Byron's poetry. This new influence shows itself in the third part of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which Byron was working on, and in Manfred, which he wrote in the autumn of 1816. At the same time, Mary had been inspired to begin writing Frankenstein. Both Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley were strong advocates of vegetarianism.

Next year Shelley met John Keats, another strong influence and a source of inspiration. To this period we sould refer the long verse drama Prometheus Unbound, which features talking mountains and a petulant demon who overthrows Zeus. The dominant theme in this work is the conflict between infinite desire and the inability to fully realize such desires.

On July 8, 1822, less than a month before his 30th birthday, Shelley drowned in a sudden storm while sailing back from Livorno to Lerici in his schooner, the Don Juan.

Shelley's unconventional life and uncompromising idealism made him a notorious figure in his own life, but he became the idol of the following two or three generations of poets (including the major Victorian poets Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne, as well as William Butler Yeats.)

John Keats (1795 - 1821) was one of the principal poets in the English Romantic movement. During his short life, his work was the subject of constant critical attacks (critics called his verse ‘Cockney School of poetry’, hinting at his low birth), and it was not until much later that the significance of the cultural change which his work both presaged and helped to form was fully appreciated. Keats's poetry is characterized by an exuberant love of the language and a rich, sensuous imagination; he often felt that he was working in the shadow of past poets, and only towards the end of his life was he able to produce his most original and most memorable poems.

Keats was born in the Swan and Hoop Inn at Moorgate, London, where his father was an ostler. The pub is now called " The John Keats at Moorgate", only a few yards from Moorgate station. When his father died his mother remarried soon afterwards, but as quickly left the new husband and moved herself and her children to live with Keats' grandmother. There, Keats attended a school that first instilled in him a love of literature.In 1814 became a student at a local hospital. During that year, he devoted most of his time to the study of literature. Keats moved to the Isle of Wight in the summer of 1817.

Finishing his epic poem " Endymion", Keats left to hike in Scotland and Ireland “Endymion” gave the world the undying motto of aetheticism: ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever’ However, he too began to show signs of tuberculosis infection on that trip, and returned. When he did, he found that Endymion had, as had Poems before it, been the target of much abuse from the critics. In 1818, his brotherTom Keats died from his infection, and John Keats moved again He he met Fanny Brawne, who with her mother had been staying at his friend’s house, and he quickly fell in love. The later publication of their correspondence was to scandalise Victorian society.

Keats produced some of his finest poetry during the spring and summer of 1819 including: Ode to Psyche, Ode on a Grecian Urn, ( source of another famous quotation: ‘Beauty is Truth, truth – Beauty’) Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on Melancholy, and To Autumn. This series of odes is nearly universally considered to be among the most perfect poetry ever written in the English language, ranking with the best of Shakespeare and Milton.

The relationship with Browne was cut short, however, when, by 1820, Keats began to show worse signs of the disease that had plagued his family. On the suggestion of his doctors, he left the cold airs of London behind and moved to Italy with his friend Joseph Severn. Keats moved into a house on the Piazza di Spagna, in Rome, where despite attentive care from Severn and Dr. John Clark, the poet's health rapidly deteriorated. He died on February 23, 1821 and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome. His last request was followed, and thus he was buried under a tomb stone reading " Here lies one whose name was writ in water."

Keats developed his own poetic theories: he stated he wished to be a " chameleon poet" and to resist the " egotistical sublime" of Wordsworth's writing. Keat’s brief maturity displays what he called ‘negative capability’: that is, exploring many subjects but not giving concrete answers. The intense experience of life, and not its perfect understanding, was Keat’s main poetic concern.

William Butler Yeats was intrigued by the contrast between the " deliberate happiness" of Keats's poetry and the sadness that characterised his life. He wrote:

I see a schoolboy when I think of him,

With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window,

For certainly he sank into his grave

His senses and his heart unsatisfied,

And made of being poor, ailing and ignorant,

Shut out from all the luxury of the world,

The coarse-bred son of a livery-stable keeper -a

Luxurious song.

 

The Great Scots

Robert Burns (1759 - 1796) was a pioneer of the Romantic movement and after his death became an important source of inspiration to the founders of both liberalism and socialism. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland, and is the best known of the poets who have written in the Scots language, although much of his writing is also in English and in a " light" Scots dialect which would have been accessible to a wider audience than simply Scottish people. At various times in his career, he wrote in English, and in these pieces, his political or civil commentary is often at its most blunt. A cultural icon in Scotland and among Scots who have relocated to other parts of the world (the Scottish diaspora), his celebration became almost a national charismatic cult during periods of the 19th and 20th centuries, and his influence has long been strong on Scottish literature.Burns also collected folk songs from across Scotland, often revising or adapting them. His poem (and song) Auld Lang Syne is often sung at Hogmanay (New Year), and Scots Wha Hae served for a long time as an unofficial national anthem of the country. Other poems and songs of Burns that remain well known today across the world include A Red, Red Rose, A Man's A Man for A' That, To a Louse, and To a Mouse.

Burns' Night, effectively a second national day, is celebrated on 25 January with Burns' Suppers around the world, and is still more widely observed than the official national day, Saint Andrew's Day, or the new North American celebration Tartan Day.

Burns was born in Alloway, South Ayrshire, Scotland, the son of William Burnes, a small farmer, and a man of considerable force of character and self-culture. His youth was passed in poverty, hardship, and a degree of severe manual labour which left its traces in a premature stoop and weakened constitution. He had little regular schooling, and got much of what education he had from his father, who taught his children reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, and history, and also wrote for them A Manual of Christian Belief. In 1783 Robert started composing poetry in a traditional style using the Ayrshire dialect of Lowland Scots. At the suggestion of his brother he published his poems in the volume, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish dialect in June 1786. This edition was brought out by a local printer in Kilmarnock and contained much of his best work, including " The Twa Dogs", " The Address to the Deil", " Hallowe'en", " The Cottar's Saturday Night", " The Mouse", and " The Daisy" The success of the work was immediate, the poet's name rang over all Scotland, and he was induced to go to Edinburgh to superintend the issue of a new edition.

There he was received as an equal by the brilliant circle of men of letters which the city then boasted.Here also Scott, then a boy of 15, saw him. Burns became an enthusiastic contributor to The Scots Musical Museum. The first volume of this was published in 1787 and included three songs by Burns. He contributed 40 songs to volume 2, and would end up responsible for about a third of the 600 songs in the whole collection as well as making a considerable editorial contribution. The final volume was published in 1803.

On his return to Ayrshire took the farm of Ellisland near Dumfries, having meanwhile taken lessons in the duties of an exciseman. His farming proved unseccessful and in 1791 he gave it up.

Meanwhile he was writing at his best, and in 1790 had produced Tam O' Shanter. About this time he was offered and declined an appointment in London on the staff of the Star newspaper, and refused to become a candidate for a newly-created Chair of Agriculture in the University of Edinburgh, although influential friends offered to support his claims. After giving up his farm he removed to Dumfries.

His worldly prospects were now perhaps better than they had ever been; but he was entering upon the last and darkest period of his career. He had become soured, and moreover had alienated many of his best friends by too freely expressing sympathy with the French Revolution, and the then unpopular advocates of reform at home. His health began to give way; he became prematurely old, and fell into fits of despondency. He died on July 21, 1796. Within a short time of his death, money started pouring in from all over Scotland to support his widow and children.

Burns' themes included republicanism (he lived during the French Revolutionary period) and Radicalism which he expressed covertly in Scots Wha Hae, Scottish patriotism, anticlericalism, class inequalities, gender roles, commentary on the Scottish Kirk of his time, Scottish cultural identity, poverty, sexuality, and the beneficial aspects of popular socialising (carousing, Scotch whisky, folk songs, and so forth). Burns and his works were a source of inspiration to the pioneers of liberalism, socialism and the campaign for Scottish self-government, and he is still widely respected by political activists today, ironically even by conservatives and establishment figures because after his death Burns became drawn into the very fabric of Scotland's national identity. It is this, perhaps unique, ability to appeal to all strands of political opinion in the country that have led him to be widely acclaimed as the national poet.

Burns' views on these themes in many ways parallel those of William Blake, but it is believed that, although contemporaries, they were unaware of each other. Burns' works are less overtly mystical.Burns is generally classified as a proto-Romantic poet, and he influenced William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Bysshe Shelley greatly. Burns would influence later Scottish writers, too.

Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet (1771-1832) was a prolific Scottish historical novelist and poet popular throughout Europe during his time. In some ways Scott was the first author to have a truly international career in his lifetime, with many contemporary readers all over Great Britain, Ireland, Europe, Australia, and North America.His novels and (to a lesser extent) his poetry are still read, but he is far less popular nowadays than he was at the height of his fame. Nevertheless many of his works remain classics of English literature. Famous titles include Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, The Lady of the Lake, Waverley and The Heart of Midlothian.

He began dabbling in writing at the age of 25, translating works from German, his first publication being rhymed versions of ballads by in 1796. He then published a three-volume set of collected Scottish ballads, The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. This was the first sign of his interest in Scotland and history from a literary standpoint. When the newspaper he partially owned became embroiled in pecuniary difficulties, Scott set out, in 1814, to write a cash-cow. The result was Waverley, a novel which did not name its author. It was a tale of the " Forty-Five" Jacobite rising in the United Kingdom with its English protagonist Edward Waverley, by his Tory upbringing sympathetic to Jacobitism, becoming enmeshed in events but eventually choosing Hanoverian respectability. The novel met with considerable success. There followed a succession of novels over the next five years, each with a Scottish historical setting. Mindful of his reputation as a poet, he maintained the anonymous habit he had begun with Waverley, always publishing the novels under the name " Author of Waverley" or attributed as " Tales of..." with no author. Even when it was clear that there would be no harm in coming out into the open he maintained the facade, apparently out of a sense of fun. During this time the nickname " The Wizard of the North" was popularly applied to the mysterious best-selling writer. His identity as the author of the novels was widely rumoured, and in 1815 Scott was given the honour of dining with George, Prince Regent, who wanted to meet " the author of Waverley".

In 1819 he broke away from writing about Scotland with Ivanhoe, a historical romance set in 12th-century England. It too was a runaway success and, as he did with his first novel, he unleashed a slew of books along the same lines. As his fame grew during this phase of his career, he was granted the title of baronet, becoming Sir Walter Scott.

From being one of the most popular novelists of the 19th century, Scott suffered from a disastrous decline in popularity after the First World War. Scott was criticized as being a clumsy writer who wrote slapdash, badly plotted novels. Scott also suffered from the rising star of Jane Austen. Scott's many flaws (ponderousness, prolixity, lack of humor) were fundamentally out of step with Modernist tastes. Nevertheless, Scott was responsible for two major trends that carry on to this day.

First, he essentially invented the modern historical novel; an enormous number of imitators (and imitators of imitators) would appear in the 19th century. It is a measure of Scott's influence that Edinburgh's central railway station, opened in 1854 for the North British Railway, is called the Waverley Station, and two noted Rose Street pubs are the Waverley and the Ivanhoe bars, both named after his English characters. Second, his Scottish novels rehabilitated the public perception of Highland culture after years in the shadows following southern distrust of hill bandits and the Jacobite rebellions. As enthusiastic chairman of the Celtic Society of Edinburgh he contributed to the reinvention of Scottish culture.

It should be stressed that he was also the first novelist to portray peasant characters sympathetically and realistically. A specific feature of his style is aiming at a correctness of colouring: he sparingly and tactfully introduces obsolete words and constuctions into his dialogue, avoiding anything obviously modern; Scott is always particular in describing customs and manners, architectural details of palaces and castles, customs and interior decoration. Scott’s influence can be seen in the works of Victor Hugo and Honore de Balzac in France, James Fenimore Cooper in the USA and Leo Tolstoy in Russia. Goethe admired his works.

Scott was also responsible, through a series of letters published in the Edinburgh Weekly News in 1826, for retaining the right of Scottish banks to issue their own banknotes, which is reflected to this day by his continued appearance on the front of all notes issued by the Bank of Scotland.

 


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