After the Battle of Culloden in 1746, British authorities imposed measures that weakened clan structures and Highland cultural life. Gaelic language, dress, music, and oral memory became associated with rebellion and backwardness in official eyes. The defeat turned a political crisis into a cultural trauma.

Gaelic poetry became a vehicle of lament, memory, and defiance after Culloden. Later Scottish poets inherited a divided cultural landscape in which English-language Romanticism often appropriated Highland sorrow while living Gaelic voices struggled for recognition.