author
James Beattie
1735–1803
A Scottish poet, moralist, and philosopher of the Enlightenment, he was widely admired in his own day for blending graceful verse with plainspoken moral thought. His best-known poem, The Minstrel, helped point British poetry toward the Romantic movement.
3 Audiobooks
The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes
by James Beattie, Robert Blair, William Falconer
The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius with some other poems
by James Beattie
The Poetical Works of James Beattie
by James Beattie
About the author
Born in Kincardineshire, Scotland, in 1735, James Beattie studied at Marischal College in Aberdeen and went on to spend much of his career there as Professor of Moral Philosophy and Logic. He first worked as a schoolmaster, but his reputation grew through both his teaching and his writing.
Beattie became famous in the late 18th century for works in both poetry and prose. His long poem The Minstrel was especially popular and is often remembered as an early sign of Romanticism, while An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth made him a notable defender of Scottish common-sense philosophy against skepticism.
What makes Beattie interesting today is the range of his work: he wrote with the clarity of a teacher, the moral concern of an essayist, and the feeling of a poet. Even though his fame has faded since his lifetime, he remains a vivid figure in the Scottish Enlightenment and in the story of how 18th-century literature began to change.