Henry+joy+mccracken

July 31, 2015 by Scottish Poetry

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July 31, 2015

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Samuel Thomson (1766-1816), the bard of Carngranny as well as a schoolteacher, was one of the Ulster folk poets who was influenced by Burns. He wrote several poems about Burns including an Epistle to Mr R[ober]t B[urn]s, which was published in 1792. Thomson sent a copy of the poem to Burns who expressed his appreciation and sent a present of books to the Ulster poet. He dedicated a volume of his poetry published in 1793 to ‘Mr Robert Burns, the Ayrshire poet’ and in 1794 he travelled to Dumfries to meet Burns and exchange poems. Thereafter he corresponded with him until the death of Burns in 1796. In 1793 Samuel Thomson published Poems on Different Subjects, partly in the Scottish Dialect. This was the earliest volume of collected poems published by any of the Ulster folk poets and it had a list of subscribers that included quite a number of prominent Belfast gentlemen. Among them were Samuel Neilson and Henry Joy McCracken, who were members of the Society of United Irishmen. Indeed can it not be argued that the United Irishmen in Ulster did more for the Ulster-Scots language than they did for the Irish language? The great enthusiasm at the end of the 18th century for the poetry of Burns and the Ulster folk poets is not in any way surprising. When the French aristocrat Le Chevalier de la Tochnaye visited Belfast in 1797 he found that, 'Belfast has almost entirely the look of a Scotch town, and the character of the inhabitants has considerable resemblance to that of the people of Glasgow.' Moreover when Amyas Griffith came to Belfast in 1780 as Surveyor of Excise he noted that ‘the common people speak broad Scotch, and the better sort differ vastly from us, both in accent and language.’ Belfast was still a very small town but it was an Ulster-Scots town and Ulster-Scots was the language of the hearth and home in the town just as it was the language of the hearth and home in many rural areas. It was the language of the ordinary people and was passed on from generation to generation.

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