William Livingston

The poet William Livingston (1808–1870) is also known by his family’s original Gaelic language surname as Uilleam Macdhunleibhe. Born to his family’s lore in Islay in the Scottish Highlands, Livingston was a hyper patriotic Gaelic author of epic poetry. An autodidact, he was a tailor by trade, yet he taught himself the Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French and Welsh languages and during his travels through the Scottish lowlands, collected an extensive knowledge of the Scottish nation’s topography, place-names and folklore, eventually, settling in the west central lowlands' Glasgow. It is also said by Koch that William Livingston presented in his poetry “a stark view of an Islay in which the human world has been all but banished from the natural landscape.” Examples of William Livingston’s work may be viewed in the Golden Treasury of Scottish Poetry.