Makar
[1] The work of the Makar of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries was in part marked out by an adoption in vernacular languages of the new and greater variety in metrics and prosody current across Europe after the influence of such figures as Dante and Petrarch and similar to the route which Chaucer followed in England.
The first of the Makars proper in this sense, although perhaps the least Scots due to his education predominantly in captivity at the English court in London, is generally taken to be James I (1394–1437) the likely author of the Kingis Quair.
Apart from other principal figures already named, writing by makars such as Richard Holland, Blind Hary and Walter Kennedy also survives along with evidence that suggests the existence of a substantial body of lost work.
The pinnacle in writing from this time was in fact Douglas's Eneados (1513), the first full and faithful translation of an important work of classical antiquity into any Anglic language.
The king composed a treatise, the Reulis and Cautelis (1584), which proposed a formalisation of Scottish prosody and consciously strove to identify what was distinctive in the Scots tradition.
[2][3] The removal of the Court to London under James after 1603 is usually regarded as marking the eclipse of the distinctively Scottish tradition of poetry initiated by the Makars, but figures such as William Drummond might loosely be seen as forming a continuation into the seventeenth century.
[4] In the more general application of the term which is current today the word can be applied to poets of the Scots revival in the eighteenth century, such as Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson.
In recent times, other examples of poets that have seemed to particularly exemplify the traditions of the makars have included Robert Garioch, Sydney Goodsir Smith, George Campbell Hay and Norman MacCaig among many others.
Other cities to create Makar posts include Glasgow (Liz Lochhead),[16] Stirling (Magi Gibson,[17] Laura Fyfe)[18] Aberdeen (Sheena Blackhall)[19] and Dundee (W.N.
