SOURCE: Fogle, French Rowe. “The General View.” In A Critical Study of William Drummond of Hawthornden, pp. 167-77. New York: King's Crown Press, 1952.

In the following essay, Fogle traces Drummond's poetic development from his early interest in the work of the Renaissance love poets to his mature religious and social verse.

Drummond is generally regarded as a “professional” poet, that is, a poet who spent his life writing poetry. This impression comes partly from the fact that we know little else about him except that he did write poetry, and partly from the fact that the bulk of his poetry is considerable and we therefore assume that it must have taken him a long time to write it. But such an assumption is hardly borne out by the facts of his life. Actually, his serious efforts in poetry were confined to a period of from twelve to at...