Allan Ramsay (1684–1758) was a true cultural polymath. As a poet, bookseller, librarian, editor, antiquarian, song-collector, songwriter, playwright and theatre-owner, he was central to Scotland's literary scene in the early eighteenth century. His co-founding in 1729 of the Academy of St. Luke, the earliest art school in Scotland, demonstrates Ramsay as a sponsor of the visual arts and of Scottish painters. From the beginnings of his poetic career in the 1710s and through his myriad cultural enterprises, he was able to carve a place for himself at the heart of Scottish literary society, in a position of genuine and lasting influence. The ballad opera version of his pastoral play, The Gentle Shepherd (1729), brought him enduring success and fame, while The Tea-Table Miscellany (1723, 1726, 1727, 1737) and The Ever Green: being a Collection of Scots Poems, Wrote by the Ingenious before 1600 (1724) established Ramsay as a gate-keeper and preserver of older Scottish literary and song culture. His Edinburgh bookshop was a buzzing cultural hub. His opening of Britain's first circulating library, probably in 1725, and his establishment of a theatre in the city's Carrubber's Close, reveal him as a cultural innovator. Ramsay's modernising impulse was, however, simultaneously concerned with preserving and, indeed, continuing the use of the forms, metres and themes of Scotland's literary past, as well as celebrating, defending and refurbishing the Scots language. In all of this, his own poetry, and his self-consciously curated persona as a Scots poet and original genius, are of fundamental significance.

Ramsay's earliest known poetical productions are associated with his time as a founding member of Edinburgh's Easy Club, a pro-Jacobite men's sociable society established in May 1712. This association, although short-lived – it was dissolved around 1715, at the time of the first Jacobite rising and as the risk of repercussions for pro-Jacobite groups increased – nevertheless set the groundwork for Ramsay's future career. In the club's ‘easy’ and accepting atmosphere, Ramsay could try his early compositions on a friendly and sympathetic audience and test the literary water. The Easy Club was responsible for publishing two early texts: the ‘Elegy on Maggy Johnston’, thought to be Ramsay's first composition and probably printed for the first time in 1712, and ‘A Poem To the Memory of the Famous Archibald Pitcairn, M.D.’, published in late 1713 or early 1714.