Weaver Poets
Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. Weaver Poets, Rhyming Weaver Poets and Ulster Weaver Poets were a collective group of poets belonging to an artistic movement who were both influenced by and contemporaries of Robert Burns and the Romantic movement.
Origins
In the late eighteenth century, a number of men involved in the textiles industry, mostly confined to counties Antrim and Down began to submit poems to newspapers and publishers. They were craftsmen and often self-employed. They are known specifically for writing poems in the common tongue of the time for that region, Scots. More often than not, they were working-class and not formally educated.[citation needed]
Some of the more well-known Weaver Poets were James Orr of Ballycarry and David Herbison - The Bard of Dunclug.
Style and form
The style they adopted was the standard Habbie as adopted from a Robert Sempill poem by Robert Fergusson, himself a Scottish weaver, and later by Burns.
Sometimes the poetry produced by the movement was political - Orr had joined the United Irishmen in 1791 and took part in the United Irishmen Rebellion of 1798.
A large number of weaver poems were collected by poet John Hewitt. Hewitt bequeathed his entire collection to the University of Ulster.
References
- Rhyming Weavers, John Hewitt, Belfast ISBN 0-85640-757-7
