Scottish Literary Review, Autumn/Winter 2025 Quotes

“Even in the early phases of tenant reduction, during the seventeenth century, many of the dispossessed appear to have maintained a foothold in the local area, often by turning to spinning and other activity associated with sheep farming - a more formal division of production and gendering of the working population. However, by the 1710s, the decade when the Buccleuchs began efforts to rationalise their 'South Country' operations, as many as two thirds of the Ettrick and Yarrow valley farms were under a single tenancy. By the 1790s, it was nine in ten. It is across this period that widespread dispossession seems to have turned into widespread clearance across the Southern Uplands in general, and Ettrick and Yarrow in particular. Tenants compelled to flit at the end of a tack would take with them wives, children, elderly relatives and unrelated servants, each removal amounting to a substantial dent to the population.”
― Angus Sutherland, Scottish Literary Review, Autumn/Winter 2025

“At the very least, it was extraordinary in offering up a very real bequest to later poets of a multi-layered hero figure, practical lessons in poetic direction and conviction, guidance in poetic technique, and, for some, a treasury of quotations, images and impressions. When aggregated, the seed capital of the poem is considerable. All this may be true but there remains a suspicion that this verdict would underplay the depth of the poem's heritability: perhaps a more accurate hypothesis is that The Minstrel had a pervasive spiritual and intellectual influence on other poets, even to the point of inspiration. Nothing like it had been written before and there are signs that it catalysed prospective poets as they grappled with their own poetical identities and sought to make a living from their talents.”
― Ian Cameron Robertson, Scottish Literary Review, Autumn/Winter 2025