SOURCE: Reid, David. “Royalty and Self-Absorption in Drummond's Poetry.” Studies in Scottish Literature 22 (1987): 115-31.

In the following essay, Reid contends that Drummond's Spenserian poetic style contradicts his political ideas, particularly his royalist sympathies.

One of the ideas Christopher Hill throws off in Milton and the English Revolution is that Milton was brought up on a tradition of political dissent in poetry.¹ He suggests that Milton's headmaster, Alexander Gill, saw to it that the boys of St. Paul's formed their taste in English poetry on Spenser and the Spenserians, Drayton, Giles and Phineas Fletcher, Browne and Wither. The Spenserians in the reign of James—and this is a story recently told at greater length and with more nuance in David Norbrook's Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance—the Spenserians were poetically out. In style and in politics they looked back to the previous reign. What was in was...