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Search - The Scots' Literary Tradition

The Scots' Literary Tradition
Author: John Speirs

THE SCOTS LITERARY TRADITION iAn Essay in Criticism by John Speirs 1940 CHA1TO WINDUS LONDON To My Wife ACKNOWLEDGMENT To the Editors of Scrutiny for having from time to time published parts of what vas to be this book, and especially to Mr. and Mrs. F. R. Leavis for their encouragement and criticism. Also to the Editors of The Aberdeen Universi... more »ty Review in whose pages there appeared what was to be the chapter on Gavin Douglass Aeneid Contents INTRODUCTION vii PART ONE 1 5th Century Scots Poetry 3 The Kingis Quhair 5 Robert Henryson n William Dunbar 35 Gavin Douglass Aeneid 56 David Lindsay 68 1 6th Century Scots Poems 83 The Scots 1 7th Century 99 PART Two Xllan Ramsays Scots Poems 107 Robert Fergusson 114 Burns 124 The Scottish Ballads 145 1 9th Century Scotland in Allegory 161 The Present and C. M. Grieve 177 Introduction THIS book is an attempt to focus as a whole and with regard to its bearing on our present problems as far as that may be possible without distortion the literary tradition in Scots. This has necessarily tended to give the book in its implicit and occasionally explicit application a socio logical bias. But I have tried to bear in mind that sociological criticism, as much as psychological criticism, is a deflection from pure literary criticism and that criticism of literature to be it self and not another thing must remain literary criticism. It has seemed for long urgent that the cultivated, whether Scottish or English, should become more sufficiently cognisant of this tradition as being a whole and as being something distinct from the southern. Realised as such, its powers might have a chance to become effective both as an enrich ment and as a corrective. For a Scotsman to become fully aware of him self it would seem even necessary that he should realise his Scottish past as something at least vis viii INTRODUCTION partially distinct from an English past. For an Englishman perplexed by a sense of exhaustion, in some of its directions, of the English language and tradition it might even be to a limited, but not unimportant, extent revitalising to grow aware also of the Scots and its resources. A fresh realisation, involving a fresh revaluation, of Scots poetry might at the very least help to correct the tendency to narrow conceptions of what poetry is, such as have from time to time since the seventeenth century damaged English poetry. In general it may perhaps be taken as axiomatic that we cannot be enough conscious at a time such as the present when they are threatened with neglect and final extinction of the traditions upon Which our in tellectual and spiritual life has depended. PART ONE Fifteenth Century Scots Poetry assumption to start from is that the Scots - L poetry of the fifteenth century really matters to us only when we feel in reading it that it is something as immediate to us as the work of any modern. But to feel it as so immediate is to feel it as what it is, and that is mediaeval poetry it is different in important respects from modern poetry. To enjoy it, any more than to enjoy any kind of poetry, we cannot be passive. There must be some effbct on our part to stand outside the changes that with time have taken place in that most important part of our mind which is part of the European mind. We cannot know whether the effort is worth making till we have made it. But the study of poetry is a means to enlarging the scope and correcting the balance of our sym pathies. The study of mediaeval poetry may help, in particular, to correct the balance in important respects in which the exclusive study of later poetry will not help. 1 1 To take a literary instance if we came to Shakespeare from as frequent reading of the mediaeval poets as we generally do from the reading of the poets since his time, our appreciation of his work might in some respects be different and, perhaps, juster...

ISBN-13: 9781406768909
ISBN-10: 1406768901
Publication Date: 3/15/2007
Pages: 200
Rating:

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Publisher: Newman Press
Book Type: Paperback
Members Wishing: 0
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