Pick two poets who seem to have nothing to do with each other — a Gothic American and a pastoral Englishman, say — and see where the catalogue actually joins them: overlapping years, shared ground, distinctive themes, and the poems that secretly rhyme.
Lady Anne Lindsay, later Lady Anne Barnard, was born on 8 December 1750 at Balcarres in Fife, Scotland, and died on 6 May 1825 in London. She is remembered above all as the author of “Auld Robin Gray,” one of the most affecting and durable songs in the Scottish literary tradition. Yet the ballad’s extraordinary afterlife has sometimes reduced its maker to a name attached to a single lyric. Her life was considerably l…
“The song of Auld Robin Gray was written by me in 1771, when I was very young.”
Neighbourhood:
Folk & Ballad Poets, Scottish Poets, Women Poets
Alexander Scott, born about 1525 and probably dead about 1584, occupies an intriguing place in the history of Scottish poetry: he is neither as monumental a figure as William Dunbar nor as internationally famous as Robert Burns, yet his surviving work gives him a distinctive and memorable voice among the later Scottish makars. He wrote at a moment when older medieval literary customs were being tested by religious re…
Lady Anne Lindsay:
balcarres, cape colony, auld robin gray, james lindsay, andrew barnard, scottish ballad tradition, edinburgh, colonial official.
Alexander Scott:
scottish makar, mary queen of scots, new year gift, older scots, rough wooing, battle of pinkie, courtly love, edinburgh.
Poems that secretly rhyme
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
