Burns night has been and gone, but poetry is for every night, and day. It’s a source of solace, comfort and cheer in difficult times like this current pandemic and lockdown So here, to help you through, are twenty of Scotland’s greatest poets, who aren’t Robert Burns.
William Dunbar (circa 1459-1530)
“Back to Dunbar!” was a favourite phrase of Hugh MacDiarmid, and the man he was talking about was a Middle Scots poet attached to the court of James IV, who wrote works that were rhetorical and lyrical marvels. Dunbar was one of a group of medieval Scots known as the “makars” and for him the writing of poetry was "making". He created poems for his patron, such as The Thrissil and the Rois, a celebration of James IV's marriage to Margaret Tudor. But Dunbar was about more than creating snapshots of court. He created poems that have resonance now. Lament for the Makaris, with its frequent refrain, timor mortis conturbat me (fear of death troubles me), still has an extraordinary potency – even as it lists the names of makars now forgotten