James Beattie, born on 25 October 1735 and dead on 18 August 1803, occupied an unusual and revealing place in eighteenth-century British culture. He was at once a Scottish professor, a poet of landscape and sensibility, a popular moral philosopher, a Christian apologist, a music lover, a man of sociable ambition, and a bereaved father whose final years were darkened by illness and loss. In his own lifetime he was fam…
“A great part of the misery of mankind proceeds from their ignorance of themselves.”
Neighbourhood:
Enlightenment Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets, Scottish Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Tenderness, Spirituality
Robert Fergusson was born in Edinburgh on 5 September 1750 and died there on 16 October 1774, not yet twenty-five years old. His life was painfully short, financially unsettled, and shadowed at its end by severe mental illness, yet the poetry written during his few active years gave him a permanent place in Scottish literature. He was the most vivid poetic observer of eighteenth-century Edinburgh before Robert Burns,…
Neighbourhood:
Georgian Poets, Light Verse Poets, Scottish Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Peace, Longing, Spirituality
