主播大秀

After 1603 and the disappearance of royal patronage for poetry, we celebrate the great Ballad tradition and the influence of folklore on the literature. This gains momentum in the 18th century when the writers react against the anglicisation process following the Union of 1707, to initiate a Vernacular Revival.
Contemporary writers such as Janice Galloway and Val McDermid testify to the power of Scots song growing up, while Kirsteen McCue of Glasgow and Penny Fielding of Edinburgh University reveal the vogue for Scots song and poetry in England through the influence of Alan Ramsay's musical play The Gentle Shepherd. Ramsay was a nationalist and Jacobite, and published the older Scots poems of the Makars as well as writing new ones, and his cultural endeavour was matched in the collections by Watson, Ruddiman and Hamilton of Gilbertfield. Many of these prime movers were Jacobites....and this was a period when Scots and Gaelic culture crossed over. One of the ironies is that Duncan Ban Macintyre joined the City Gaird of Edinburgh which Robert Fergusson called the Black Banditti - because of their reputation for police brutality. So the greatest Gaelic and Scots poets of the age possibly confronted each other on the steering streets o auld reikie.
We celebrate what Robert Louis Stevenson called the "fizzing vitality" of Fergusson' poetry and hear James Robertson's poem in praise of his statue in the Canongate. Burns recognised his debt to Fergusson when he paid for his headstone and described him as "my elder brother in misfortune, by far my elder brother in the muse." We hear how Burns took up the Scots tradition and gave birth to a world wide cult - the American writer Ralph Waldo Emmerson saying that his songs were "the property and solace of mankind.".