Constructing the Ulster Labouring-Class Poet: The Case of Samuel Thomson

Abstract

Samuel Thomson (1766–1816), a native of the Presbyterian, Scots-speaking townland of Carngranny in South Antrim, was in his own lifetime a respected poet and instigator of an early Romantic coterie of fellow poets in the north of Ireland. He was the first of his circle to produce a published volume of verse, Poems on Different Subjects, Partly in the Scottish Dialect (1793), and assaulted the literary marketplace on several fronts, marketing himself in the Belfast radical press as a brother poet of Robert Burns; as a master of both Scots vernacular and Augustan pastoral poetry; and as a tutelary figure in a specifically Northern school of Irish poetry. His early popular success spurred him on to publish two further and more complex editions of poetry, New Poems on a Variety of Different Subjects (1799) and Simple Poems on a Few Subjects (1806).