Selected Poems

Re-inventing Scottish poetry in the twentieth century, Hugh MacDiarmid's war cry was: 'Not Burns - Dunbar!' With it, he celebrated William Dunbar (1460?-1520?) as 'in many ways the most modern, as he is the most varied, of Scottish poets'. His verve, wit, metrical skill, malice and elegiac power made him one of the greatest poet of the fifteenth century and a defining Scottish poet of all time.A priest for most of his adult life, he saw himself, perhaps more than most of his literary contemporaries, as a professional poet rather than a cleric and took pride in the exercise of his craft, reminding the King, his employer, of the unwisdom of neglecting to reward poets. He was influenced as much by Villon as by Chaucer and drew on mediaeval traditions which in his hands are made serviceable one last time - vivid, challenging, expressive.More than any other mediaeval poet, Dunbar speaks to us in accents which we recognise today. 'Whatever your taste, pious, gay, melancholy, bawdy, he will write a poem for you, apt and elegant', said W.H.Auden. Poems of all these kinds are included in this selection.Dr Harriet Harvey-Wood read English and Mediaeval Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She joined the British Council in 1973, becoming Literature Director until her retirement in 1994. She is currently working on a biography of John Gibson Lockhart. She was a judge of the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1992 and was appointed OBE in 1993.