James Hogg Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Valentina Bold

Critical Essay by Valentina Bold

SOURCE: Bold, Valentina. “James Hogg and the Scottish Self-Taught Tradition.” In The Independent Spirit: John Clare and the Self-Taught Tradition, edited by John Goodridge, pp. 69-86. Helpston, England: The John Clare Society, 1994.

In the following essay, Bold discusses Hogg's influence and reception as “The Ettrick Shepherd,” his peasant-poet persona.

I'd like to start by quoting a letter from [John] Clare to Allan Cunningham, ‘the Nithsdale Mason’, a very close friend of ‘The Ettrick Shepherd’, James Hogg. Addressing his ‘Brother Bard and Fellow Labourer’ in 1824 Clare observed:

… the ‘Ettrick Shepherd,’ ‘The Nithsdale Mason,’ and ‘The Northamptonshire Peasant,’ are looked upon as intruders and stray cattle in the fields of the Muses … Well, never mind, we will do our best, and as we never went to Oxford or Cambridge, we have no Latin and Greek to boast of, and no bad translations to hazard (whatever our poems may...
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