Bruce Gilkison, Walking with James Hogg: The Ettrick Shepherd’s Journeys Through Scotland, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. 208pp. £14.99. ISBN: 9781474415385

Bruce Gilkison, Walking with James Hogg: The Ettrick Shepherd’s Journeys Through Scotland, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. 208pp. £14.99. ISBN: 9781474415385

“Here, oh, here / We bear the bier / Of the Father of many a cancelled year! ” These were Shelley's words written in the year of 1820, two decades after Lyrical Ballads had shaken the ground of eighteenth century's literary world (96). Defiance is not too rare a watchword for a generation which exerts much of its creative potency on the line of an inherited tradition, from their “fathers,” forging an original form that is altogether new in its language, vocabulary and poetics by consciously breaking loose from the old. Yet the attitude that the romantics adapted towards their literary fathers is at most ambiguous; as the anti-hero Prometheus curses yet owes his freedom to the mercy of the father god. It is conspicuous that Gilkison writes with no real attention paid to Hogg as a romantic. But in spite of the fact that the book is intended to be more about Hogg the man and the forefather, maybe above all Hogg the Ettrick shepherd, as the title goes, than Hogg the poet, Gilkison writes with a fortuitous charm in addressing this father-son discourse.