Scots poetry: a living tradition

Poetry is one of the main forms of writing in Scots today, with a written tradition going back to the 14th century.

Poets currently writing in Scots include Sheena Blackhall, Thomas Clark, Jo Gilbert, W. N. Herbert, Liz Lochhead, Stuart Paterson, Len Pennie, Derek Ross and Rab Wilson. Their work spans the main dialects of Scots, including Doric, Shetland, Orkney, West Central, Borders and Ulster Scots.

Scots poetry reaches readers through several platforms. The Scottish Poetry Library publishes poems in Scots online, commissions new work for its annual Gies a Scots Poem Day and runs a yearly Best Scottish Poems selection in Scots.

The Scots Language Centre hosts a Makar of the Month publishing poems by new and establisehd poets.

Lallans, the magazine of the Scots Language Society, has published new writing in Scots since 1973, and newer magazines such as Poetry Scotland and Pushing out the Boatalso carry work in Scots.

Publishers of Scots poetry include Tapsalteerie, whose Modren Makars series introduces new poets, Rymour Books, Doric Books, Luath and Tippermuir, and larger presses such as Canongate.

Annual prizes for poetry in Scots include the Scots Language Society’s Hugh MacDiarmid Tassie, the McCash Prize and the Wigtown Scots Prize.

History of Scots poetry

The earliest poem in Scots to survive in written form is a short lyric on the death of Alexander III, who died in 1286. It is preserved in Andrew Wyntoun’s Original Chronicle, finished around 1420. The first long poem in Scots is John Barbour’s The Brus, written around 1375: twenty books of rhyming couplets on Robert I and the Wars of Independence. It was followed in the 1420s by The Kingis Quair, attributed to James I, and later by Blind Harry’s The Wallace.

Under James III and James IV, in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, the makars, or court poets, included Robert Henryson, William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas. Henryson wrote The Testament of Cresseid and the Morall Fabillis. Dunbar’s work ranges from religious poems to The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy, a contest in verse insults, and his Lament for the Makaris names many of his contemporaries. Douglas translated Virgil’s Aeneid into what he called “the langage of Scottis natioun”. James VI was also a poet, and set out rules for writing verse in Scots in his Reulis and Cautelis.

After the Union of the Crowns in 1603 the court moved to London, and many poets, such as William Drummond of Hawthornden, wrote in English. Scots remained the everyday spoken language, but writing for publication increasingly appeared in English.

In the 18th century Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns led a revival of poetry in Scots, drawing on older Scots poets and on song. In the 19th century cheaper printing brought a large output of poetry in the regional dialects, from Janet Hamilton in Coatbridge to newspaper verse in Shetland. Collections such as Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802 to 1803) printed many of the Border ballads.

In the 1920s Hugh MacDiarmid began writing modernist poetry in Scots. He drew words from all the dialects and from John Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, and published Sangschaw (1925), Penny Wheep (1926) and A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle(1926). He was followed by William Soutar and Douglas Young. In the North East, Charles Murray, Marion Angus and John C. Milne wrote in Doric.

Mirroring, but sometimes in conflict with the folk revival of the 1960's Scots poetry continued to grow, reflecting conteporary issues including Robert Garioch, Sydney Goodsir Smith and Tom Leonard.