SOURCE: "The Golden Age of Scottish Culture: Poetry and Novels," in A History of the Scottish People, 1560-1830, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969, pp. 489-500.

A professor of Scottish history at the University of St. Andrews, Smout has written several important historical studies of Scotland, including Scottish Trade on the Eve of the Union, 1660-1707 (1963) and (with I. Levitt) The State of the Scottish Working Class in 1843 (1979). In the following excerpt, Smout discusses the culmination and subsequent decline of Scottish poetry.

Why should Scottish imaginative literature of the eighteenth century … beat up to a crescendo of achievement and then break off into a silence broken only by staccato outbursts? This is a problem to which there is perhaps no simple answer, but traditions in poetry and fiction both appeared to lead into a cul-de-sac from which it was difficult to make further meaningful advance.

In poetry the cul-de-sac was a...