Drummond, William (1585–1649)

Scottish poet. He was one of the first Scottish poets to use English, and his Poems (1614) also show the strong influence of European models. He has been called the Scottish Petrarch because of his passionate sonnets of 1616 inspired by the early death of his first love, Mary Cunningham.

Drummond was educated at Edinburgh and in France at Bourges and Paris, and spent the greater part of his life in his birthplace Hawthornden, dividing his time between poetry, royalist pamphlets, and melancholy. He was visited at Hawthornden by his friend Ben Jonson, and his notes on their time together, first published in full as Conversations (1832), form a pleasant and instructive chapter of literary history. Drummond's inspiration and much of his sensuousness are drawn from Edmund Spenser, and his poems prove him to have been well acquainted with the works of Philip Sidney and many Italian poets.

Flowers of Sion (1623) contains his ‘Cypress Grove’, a prose poem on death, which reflects his own private melancholy, and is free from the extravagant conceits which sometimes mar his verse. Others of his works are Forth Feasting (1617) and, in prose, The History of Scotland, from the Year 1423 until the Year 1542 (1655), known also as History of Scotland during the Reigns of the Five Jameses.