Liz Lochhead is the first fully professional Scottish woman poet of the modem period, perhaps of any period of Scottish women's writing. Before her, Marion Angus is alone among twentieth-century women poets in being remarkable for the quality, quantity and priority of her verse. Many of the writers dealt with elsewhere in this volume tried their hand at poetry but are not famous for it. Violet Jacob might be an exception to this, yet it is hard to feel that she would benefit from the publication of her collected poems as Marion Angus would. Catherine Carswell, Nan Shepherd, Naomi Mitchison and Muriel Spark all wrote poems, but it is not for their verse that these writers are chiefly remembered. Nor do I want to pretend to comprehensive coverage by merely romping through a list of names - the bibliography can do that - and some service has been done to women poets by the various anthologies now available.

I should like, however, to look in some detail at three poets from the earlier part of the century who might be felt to be exemplary cases of women's experience in poetry. The first, Rachel Annand Taylor, is a kind of heroine, frequently the self-conceived heroine of her own verse; the second, Olive Fraser, was regarded, and regarded herself for most of her life, as mentally ill: after appropriate treatment she enjoyed a brief re-awakening, sadly too late, into a fuller life; the third, Helen Cruickshank, despite her lifelong activity in and for poetry, was a self-submerged and generous handmaiden to a male-dominated poetic movement. That these are oversimplifications will emerge but they will do as preliminary characterisations and they certainly suggest roles which female poets have to confront and transcend in their path towards professional autonomy.

Rachel Annand Taylor (¡876-1960)

Of the Scottish women poets who began writing at the end of the nineteenth century, and who might be labelled Edwardian, the most prolific and possibly the most enduring, is Rachel Annand Taylor. I say ‘possibly’ most enduring because although her verse still pops up in anthologies, the lushness of Taylor's poetic imagination seemed cloying and effusive even to some of her contemporaries. Her great champion was Herbert Grierson who in his A Critical History of English Poetry praises her more highly than any other Edwardian woman poet: