William Drummond is the last significant figure in Scottish poetry before the Eighteenth Century. The gap between him and Alan Ramsay indicates a crisis in Scottish literary culture brought on by the departure of the Scottish court to London with the accession of James VI of Scotland to the throne of Great Britain. James had been a patron of poets, dabbled in poetry himself and delivered himself of Rewellis and Cautelis [Do's and Don'ts] for its composition. Not only had the court been a centre of literary activity where men of letters such as Drummond's uncle, William Fowler, and his friend William Alexander of Menstrie, later Earl of Stirling, gained employment, it had also given authority to Scots as a literary language. These …
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Citation: Reid, David. "William Drummond of Hawthornden". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 20 October 2001 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=1319, accessed 26 November 2024.]
