New Dimensions Of Romanticism-Scottish, English in James Grahame Poetry

James Grahame, 1765-1811 is a meritorious poet of the later part of the eighteenth century and the early part of the nineteenth century. He is a Scottish poet surcharged with Scottish patriotism, the devotional character of the Scottish people and beautiful sights of the Scottish hills and dales. His importance is realized all the more when it has been disclosed to us that he has contributed not only to the refreshing interests in the Scottish literature but also to the progress of English poetry which was struggling to come out of the eighteenth-century swamp of artificiality, urbanity, and sophistication. He depicts nature with highly imaginative colors. He calls the humming birds, "atoms of the rainbow" and the eagles, "those winged leopards, the poets of the upper sky" and the nightingale as "the melodious angle of darkness". He reads "constancy in torture and in death" in the Covenanters' struggle and achieves Shakespearian loftiness and Miltonic grandeur in his blank verse in the phrases like, "waveless calm of the deep", "tremulous swell" and "bloomy sprays of some green vale". He is thus a great poet having lasting claim to be remembered and honored.