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Born in Tayport, Fife, on 5 June 1913, Douglas Young was one of the most charismatic and distinguished Scots of his day. Described by Nigel Tranter as a ‘Poet, scholar, author, linguist, raconteur and fighter of causes’, he was a genuine polymath, an intellectual giant, and his range of interests was exceptional. A brilliant Classical scholar, who studied and later taught Latin and Greek, he had a great facility for languages. Above all he was fluent in ‘Lallans’ or Lowland Scots, in the tradition of Burns, Scott and Stevenson. Young was one of the leading ‘Scottish Renaissance’ poets or ‘neoLallans Makars’, and his two notable volumes of his poetry were Auntran Blads: an outwale of verses (1943) and A Braird O Thristles (1947), included here. Among the mighty coterie of post-MacDiarmid makars, Douglas Young stands out as an individual voice. To their common mission of restoring the Scots tongue as a fully-developed poetic language, he brings his formidable erudition, his comprehensive knowledge of Scottish literature of all periods and his highly-polished prosodic technique. To a greater degree than almost any of his contemporaries, he succeeds in integrating words from the mediaeval period, from the era of Burns and from his own time and place into a consistent idiolect, which he employs for poetic statements that are often beautiful, often profound, and always thought-provoking. This new edition of his poetry will confirm his place as one of the central figures of the twentieth-century Scottish Renaissance. - J. Derrick McClure Even in the fifties when I was starting out through university politics, Douglas Young was a legend. For young minds, his two jail sentences for refusing conscription were a singular demonstration of moral courage and he paid the penalty of facing down the establishment by not being awarded the professorship his talents deserved. - Gordon Wilson, Former Chairman of the SNP and MP for Dundee East
