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Home / Publications / Books / Scotnotes Study Guides / Scotnote 12

Scotnote 12

The Poetry of
WILLIAM DUNBAR

Ronald D. S. Jack

Published in: Paperback.
By: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1997
Price: £5.95
ISBN 978-0-948877-32-2

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Along with his contemporary Robert Henryson, William Dunbar is the foremost figure of Scottish medieval literature. Writing as a court poet during the reign of James IV, Dunbar was at the intellectual heart of Scotland’s Renaissance. His poetry is among the greatest in the Scots language: sophisticated, versatile and stylish, the work of a master of considerable literary genius.

Ronald Jack’s Scotnote examines a number of Dunbar’s most important works – The Thrissil and the Rois, The Lament for the Makaris, The Golden Targe, The Twa Mariit Wemen and the Wedo and others – and explains the background, history, language and influences for senior school pupils and students at all levels.

CONTENTS

  • Introduction
  • At the Court of James IV
  • Message and Medium: ‘To the Merchantis of Edinburgh’
  • The Ladder of Style: Devilishness, Death and Damian
  • Form and Meaning: of ‘Targe’ and ‘Tretis’

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Retrieving and Renewing: a poem for ASL

   Forget your literature? – forget your soul.
   If you want to see your country hale and whole
   Turn back the pages of fourteen hundred years.
   Surely not? Oh yes, did you expect woad and spears?
   In Altus Prosator the bristly blustery land
   Bursts in buzz and fouth within a grand
   Music of metrical thought. Breathes there the man
   With soul so dead—? Probably! But a scan
   Would show his fault was ignorance:
   Don’t follow him. Cosmic circumstance
   Hides in nearest, most ordinary things.
   Find Scotland – find inalienable springs.
  Edwin Morgan, 2004

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