The spirit Renaissance
in early gives a huge impact to Scotland. Literature, art and music in the late
15 century have embraced the spirit. It showed the great development of early
poetry influenced by international culture and movement. It led to the Age of
Enlightenment when many philosophical ideas promoted the great intellectual
movement in Scotland. The movement has successfully formed a modern world in
Scotland. Robert Burns is the most legendary poet that has celebrated his
achievement during the Age.
In
the early eras, Scottish literature was actually dominated by poetry. Yet, his
Romantic poems got big influence from William Wordsworth from England. Auld
Lang Syne is his popular poetry sung in ballad song. The ballad poetry features
are mainly used rhymes and beats. These features will ease us to remember such
poetry in the form of songs. Since in the early development of Scottish ballad
which was the early form of poetry was actually taken in the form of oral
tradition and not written. The themes of early Scottish poetry were about fantasy, supernatural, comedy, and nationalism. For those who like
poetry, early Scottish ballads have portrayed the tradition and culture and
sometimes make some groups of people particularly the churches attempted to ban
the poetry due to offensive and vulgar words like incest issue and other sexual
intercourse issues inserted in the words. As readers,
you will a direct description to the core of poetry without any initial
introduction or even metaphors. The main reason why the early poets did not
write their poetry but in songs was they were working class. The working class
at the time was not educated and illiterate. Thus, the only way to inherit
their work was in the form of songs.
How
the Oral Tradition of early poetry collected
The early Scottish poetry were not written but orally inherited then how they
were collected or even recorded in the history of Scottish Names or literature. There
are three common theories of how they were collected based on the Scottish
scholars:
·
They formulate the first theory
that perhaps the ballads originated from the folk music at the era.
·
They assume that those who
wrote ballads are people who have close relations or links to the royal family
since the themes were commonly about the life events of nobility or royalty.
The assumption is related to the facts that the ballads are very completed and
versed well.
·
The last theory is that the
collectors of ballads have collected them from anonymous sources.
In the later
generation after Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) made Scottish
literature popular in the international
world, since many of his works including novels, ballads, poems and other forms
of writings translated into several common languages in the world. Museums and
libraries are the places where you can see and track the early history of
Scottish poems to the modern literature. Due to the popularity and contribution
of Sir Walter Scott, his figure then sits in Edinburgh to honor his life and
work for Scottish literature.
