Michael Bruce

Michael Bruce (March 27th 1746 - July 5th 1767) was a British Poète .

He was born in Kinnesswood in the parish from Portmoak, in the county of Kinross-shire (today subdivision of Perth and Kinross). His/her father, Alexander Bruce, were Tisserand. Michael learned how to read before age the four years and one of its preferred books was a copy of works of Sir David Lyndsay. Its frequentation of the school was often stopped because, the summer, it was to carry out cattle grazes of them on the Lomond Hills (Lomond hills) and this early company of nature strongly influenced its poems. Of fragile health, it grows like the preferred child of the family and her friends. He studied the Latin and the Greek and, at the fifteen years age, the end of its schooling, a small heritage received by his/her mother and increased gifts of pleasant neighbors enabled him to go to the Université of Edinburgh which he attended during the four winter sessions of 1762 with 1765.

In 1765 it taught during the summer, in Gairney Bridge, receiving approximately 5 shillings of fees per annum and lodging in a hearth of students. It became student adulated in Kinross within a known Scottish section under the name of Burghers and, as of the first summer of his course (1766), one entrusted to him the responsibility for a new school with Forest Mill close to Clackmannan, where it carried out a life marked by poverty, the disease and loneliness. It wrote there Loch Leven , a poem inspired of the memories of its childhood. He already had been threatened of consumption and had become seriously sick. During the winter which followed, it returned to foot in his father where it wrote the most beautiful last and of his poems, Elegy written in Spring ( Élégie written in spring ). He died at the beginning of the summer, the July 5th 1767.

Its reputation of poet was propagated, due to the emotion for its untimely death; and also because of the flight pled by John Logan of several of its poems. Logan, a fellow student of Bruce, obtained from the father of Bruce the manuscripts of the poet little time after his death. Alexander Bruce did not require any receipt nor does not draw up any list for the letters, the poems and others which it transmitted. Logan published, in 1770, Poems one Several Occasions, by Michael Bruce ( Poèmes on several events ) in which appears Ode to the Cuckoo ( Ode with the cuckoo ). In the foreword, Logan informs that “ to constitute a collection, certain poems written by various inserted authors one. ” In a collection of its own poems, in 1781, Logan publishes Ode to the Cuckoo as being its work and the friends of Bruce publicly did not dispute this appropriation. In a manuscript Pious Memorials off Portmoak ( Pious memories of Portmoak ), discovered by David Pearson, a friend of Bruce, the paternity of Bruce on Ode to the Cuckoo is categorically marked.

This book was in possession of the Birrell family, and John Birrell, another friend of the poet, added his testimony in the same direction. Pearson and Birrell also wrote with the Dr. Robert Anderson whereas it published his British Poets ( Poètes British ) specifying the complaints about the writings of Bruce. Their communication was used by Anderson in the Vie prefacing works of Logan in the work British Poets (vol. II, p. 1029). The friends of Bruce had been surprised of what the edition of 1770 by Logan is incomplete and the father of Bruce considered it regrettable that it missed there the Gospel Sonnets of his son; the partisans of Bruce supposed that these sonnets were the Hymns published in a collection of poems that Logan made print (as a personal production) in 1781. Logan tried to seize justice to prevent the publication of the Poems of Bruce, but the work was printed in 1782,1784,1796 and 1807 - to see off Life Michael Bruce ( Vie of Michael Bruce ) of James Mackenzie, 1905, chap. XII.

In 1837, Dr. William McKelvie revived the complaints for Bruce in Loch Leven and Other Poems, by Michael Bruce, with has Life off the Author from Original Sources ( Loch Leven and other poems, by Michael Bruce, with a life of the author starting from original sources ). The paternity of Logan rests on the publications of the poems under its own name and on its reputation of author of alive sound. Its failure to produce the Book of Poems of Bruce which had been entrusted to him and the fact that there does not exist any copy of its hand (at the very least of living of Bruce) of Ode to the Cuckoo make difficult not to show it plagiarism. John Veitch, in Natural The Feeling for in Scottish Poetry ( the feeling of nature in Scottish poetry ) appeared in 1887, supports (vol. II pp. 89-91) that the known stanza as being an addition of Logan to this Ode does not go with the remainder of the poem and is more in the style of the usual compositions of Logan in which nothing can make suggest the direct simplicity of the small poem on the Coucou.

See too

Scottish Literature

Random links: