Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry

This anthology of Scottish Poetry is a selection of non-canonical 19th-century poems based on the corpus of DVPP. The poems range from the Romantic era to the late century and are written by both Gaelic and English-speaking poets. Literary historians have conventionally asserted that Scottish poetry between the death of Robert Burns and the rise of the twentieth-century Scottish Literary Renaissance is neither interesting nor valuable. However, this anthology gives a flavour of the literary vibrancy and historical relevancy of 19th-century Scottish periodical poetry, and is meant to inspire further research. The poems are chosen from Scottish periodicals such as Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Chambers’s (Edinburgh) Journal, The Chartist Circular, Good Words, and The Evergreen, and cover a wide range of Scottish socio-economic class experiences as well as diverse topics such as childhood and youth, death and mourning, nationalism and politics, and the close affinity between nature and place. And the sense of a specifically Scottish literary tradition is also very evident, such as in Helen K. Wilson’s Letter Written by Robert Burns (1878). Most of the poets in this anthology will be completely unfamiliar, although they published in highly circulating Scottish periodicals, and their person records give new information on them from primary research into documents such as historical census and baptism records. This anthology of Scottish Poetry was made possible by the generous funding of St. Andrew’s and Caledonian Society Endowment in Scottish Studies (2024-2025). (TNT)