Walter Kennedy (poet)

[4] Walter was a Scottish makar associated with the renaissance court of James IV, perhaps best known as the defendant against William Dunbar in The Flyting of Dumbar and Kennedie, but his surviving works clearly show him to have been an accomplished "master" in many genres.

In the Flyting, for instance, Dunbar makes big play of Kennedy's Carrick roots (albeit in the rankly insulting terms that are part of the genre) and strongly associates him with Erschry, which meant in other words the bardic tradition.

By this time, the term Irish in Scotland signified Gaelic generally: Kennedy also appears at the end of Dunbar's Lament for the Makaris (c.1505) where he is described as being close to death (in poynt of dede) though there is no evidence that he died at this date.

The twentieth-century poet William Neill, interested in Kennedy's South Ayrshire roots and his possible role as a Gaelic speaker in the Scottish court, has incorporated tributes to the makar into his own writing.

I saw Walter Kennedy walking through the apple of my eye under the shadow of the Black Vault, at the time of sunset, and the gravel under his feet on the grey beach of Dunure...Attribution: