Scotlands

If poets were the unacknowledged keepers of a nation's soul, then an anthology of two thousand years of Scottish poets' responses to their country should offer illuminating insights into changing perspectives on Scotland throughout history. What did poets, among the most sensitive of Scottish commentators, prize or decry in their country? How did they value its landscape, its institutions, its ordinary and extraordinary people? This anthology considers a wide range of poems from the earliest times to the present day which either use "Scotland" as their title or focus centrally on the issue of nation and place, intriguingly illustrating how ideas of Scotland as a nation and a place of belonging have changed significantly over more than a thousand years. From the Gaelic poets to Dunbar and Henryson, and from Ramsay, Fergusson and Burns through the neglected nineteenth century to the Scottish Renaissance of MacDiarmid and modern poets including Edwin Morgan, Norman MacCaig, Iain Crichton Smith, Liz Lochhead, and Douglas Dunn, this collection offers an astonishing variety of ways of responding to the idea of nationhood.