SOURCE: "The Old Communal Culture," in Scottish Literature and the Scottish People: 1680-1830, Chatto & Windus, 1961, pp. 19-39.

A professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Lancaster, Craig utilized a cross-disciplinary perspective in such books as The Real Foundations: Literature and Social Change (1973). In the following excerpt, he analyzes the social themes of eighteenth-century Scottish poetry and discusses the Edinburgh society that influenced such poets as Ramsay and Fergusson.

[Scottish poetry] is peculiarly rich in all that has to do with social life. In the 17th and 18th centuries it is taken up almost exclusively with that, but socialness of a kind very different from, say, the equally 'social' English poetry of that time. Dryden and Pope lived amidst and wrote for an upper-middle and upper class metropolitan world of coffeehouse, town mansion, and country estate, a milieu of politicians and landowners growing rich (or bankrupt...