William Drummond was the first notable poet in Scotland to write deliberately in English. He also was the first to use the canzone, a medieval Italian or Provençal metrical form, in English verse.
Background
William Drummond, commonly called Drummond of Hawthornden, was born on 13 December in 1585 in Hawthornden, near Edinburgh. His father, John Drummond, was the first laird of Hawthomden, and his mother was Susannah Fowler, sister of William Fowler.
Education
Drummond received his early education at the high school of Edinburgh. In July 1605 he graduated as M. A. from the recently founded University of Edinburgh and then spent a few years in France, ostensibly studying law in Bourges and Paris.
Career
In 1610 Drummond settled down on his Hawthornden estate, leaving law for literature and devoting himself to the life of a cultured and rather detached man of means. Drummond adapted and translated poems from French, Italian, and Spanish, in addition to borrowing from such English poets as Sir Philip Sidney. Apart from his Poems (1614, 1616), Drummond wrote Forth Feasting (1617), a poem celebrating James I’s visit to Scotland in that year. His collection of religious verse, Flowres of Sion, appeared in 1623. Drummond was apparently the author of Polemo-Medinia inter Vitarvam et Nebernam (1645), a macaronic piece intermingling Scots and Latin. In 1632 he began his History of Scotland, which appeared posthumously in 1655.