Allan Ramsay was central to all aspects of Scottish literary culture in the eighteenth century, working simultaneously in editing, playwriting, theatre management, song collecting and bookselling, as well as founding and directing Britain’s first circulating library. It was, however, his own original work as a poet which had a transformative influence on the way in which Scottish literature would develop in the ensuing decades and, indeed, centuries. Emerging as a published author in the early 1710s, Ramsay built a remarkably prominent profile as a poet of the Scots language whose work appealed to a diverse range of readers, allowing him to produce prestigious subscribers’ editions of his poems in 1721 and 1728 and to continue as a poet until his death in 1758. This definitive and ground-breaking edition of Ramsay’s poems reflects the fifty-year career of an influential cultural and literary innovator, which will open new avenues for research.

These volumes engage in a long overdue and commendably serious reappraisal of this long-neglected poet. [...] Solid, well-grounded, and accessible, these valuable new studies mark a truly auspicious beginning for the Edinburgh edition of Ramsay’s collected works. -- Carol McGuirk * 18th-Century Scotland *
Author, antiquarian and cultural impresario, Allan Ramsay stands at the heart of Edinburgh's literary Enlightenment and the reanimation, especially, of a vibrant Scots vernacular poetic mode. In this superb edition, Rhona Brown definitively supersedes the haphazard efforts of earlier editors, and gives us this important poet with new clarity and completeness. -- Thomas Keymer, University of Toronto

Allan Ramsay (c. 1684–1758) was a foundationally important poet, dramatist, song collector, theatre owner, cultural leader in art and music, and innovative entrepreneur in many spheres from language to libraries. Rhona Brown is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Scottish Literature and the Periodical Press at the University of Glasgow. She specialises in eighteenth-century Scots language poetry and the history of the periodical press in Scotland, as well as in eighteenth-century club culture. Brown is author of Robert Fergusson and the Scottish Periodical Press (2012) and co-editor of Before Blackwood’s: Scottish Journalism in the Age of Enlightenment (2015), and she has published widely on eighteenth-century Scottish literature and journalism. In the Collected Works of Allan Ramsay series, Brown is editor of a two-volume edition of Ramsay’s Poems (2023), and she is co-editor of the Oxford University Press edition of Robert Burns’s Correspondence.