Allan Ramsay (15 October 1686 – 7 January 1758) was a Scottish poet (or makar), playwright, publisher, librarian and impresario of early Enlightenment Edinburgh.

Ramsay published verses and turned bookseller in 1718, selling poetry collections like Wealth and the Woody, a satire on the South Sea Company.

Ramsay edited The Tea-Table Miscellany and The Ever Green and is considered as a pastoral writer and editor who revived interest in vernacular literature.

[3] He married Christian Ross in 1712; a few years after he had established himself as a wig-maker (not as a barber, as has been often said) in the High Street, and soon found himself in comfortable circumstances.

The choice of the two names has some significance, when we consider his later literary life as the associate of the Queen Anne poets and as a collector of old Lowland Scots poetry.

[4] By 1718 he had made some reputation as a writer of occasional verse, which he published in broadsheets, and then (or a year earlier) he turned bookseller in the premises where he had hitherto plied his craft of wig-making.

[4] In The Ever Green: being a Collection of Scots Poems wrote by the Ingenious before 1600, Ramsay had another purpose, to reawaken an interest in the older national literature.

In the volume of poems published in 1721 Ramsay had shown his bent to this genre, especially in "Patie and Roger", which supplies two of the dramatis personae to his greater work.

The sun in glory glowing, With morning dew bestowing Sweet fragrance, life, and growing To flowers and every tree.

With a touch of vanity he expressed the fear lest "the coolness of fancy that attends advanced years should make me risk the reputation I had acquired".

Gay probably visited him in Edinburgh, and Pope praised his pastoral, compliments that were undoubtedly responsible for some of Ramsay's unhappy poetic ventures beyond his Scots vernacular.

As a pastoral writer ("in some respects the best in the world", according to James Henry Leigh Hunt), he contributed, at an early stage, to the naturalistic reaction of the 18th century.

His Gentle Shepherd, by its directness of impression and its appreciation of country life, anticipates the attitude of Romanticism, the school which broke with neo-classical tradition.

It has the "mixed" faults which make the greater poem of his Scots successor, Thomson, a "transitional" document, but these give it an historical, if not an individual, interest.

[14] From 1713 Ramsay ran a wigmaker's and printseller's shop in Niddrie's Wynd, close to McEuen's High Street premises.

The preface to his Ever Green is a protest against "imported trimming" and "foreign embroidery in our writings" and a plea for a return to simple Scottish tradition.

He had no scholarly interest in the past, and he never hesitated to transform the texts when he could give contemporary "point" to a poem; but his instinct was good, and he did much to stimulate an ignorant public to fresh enjoyment.

[16] Since 2015, a Collected Works of Allan Ramsay (general editor Murray Pittock) has been in preparation from Edinburgh University Press: the first volume, the Gentle Shepherd, is expected in 2022.

[17][needs update] In 1846 Ramsay was depicted as one of sixteen Scottish poets and writers on the lower section of the Scott Monument on Princes Street in Edinburgh.