William Dunbar
William Dunbar - A Famous Scottish Poet
William Dunbar (c. 1460 - 1520) Very little is known of Dunbar's life: he may have taken a Master's degree \t St. Andrew's in 1479, he may have been a Franciscan at one time, he was in England in 1501, and by 1504 he had taken holy orders. He was in the service of King James IV of Scotland, and court poet at a time when the Scottish court was at its height as the centre of learning and gaiety. Nearly all his poetry therefore occasional, and lacked the meditative depth of the work of his elder contemporary, Robert Henryson. But Dunbar made up for this with a vein of truly fantstic humour, a wonderful verve of language, a vocabulary of vituperation excelled by none, versatility, and technical brilliance in many verse forms. From the aureate diction of his formal celebrations and sacred poems to the scurrility and obscenity of The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie or The Twa Mariit Wemen and the Wedo ('The Two Married Women and the Widow'), Dunbar was complete master of his craft. In spite of a veneer of Renascence brilliance he was, with the English John Skelton, the last truly medieval poet.
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