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…
“There is not a book on earth so favorable to all the kind and to all the sublime affections, or so unfriendly to hatred and persecution, to tyranny, injustice, and every sort of malevolence, as the Gospel.”
Neighbourhood:
Enlightenment Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets, Scottish Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Tenderness, Spirituality
Michael Bruce was born on 27 March 1746 at Kinnesswood, a small village in the parish of Portmoak, Kinross-shire, Scotland, on the eastern shore of Loch Leven. His name has long been associated with the image of the gifted rural poet, cut down before maturity and remembered through a body of work shadowed by disputed authorship. That image contains a real pathos, but it can also obscure the particular circumstances o…
Neighbourhood:
Love Poets, Nature Poets, Romantic Poets, Scottish Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
