William Edmondstoune Aytoun
William Edmondstoune Aytoun was a Scottish poet, lawyer, and academic born in 1813 in Edinburgh. He was influenced by his conservative father and his Jacobite mother, who instilled in him a love for traditional Scots ballads. Aytoun attended the Edinburgh Academy and University, where he published his first volume of poetry, “Poland, Homer, and Other Poems,” reflecting his early political sentiments, which later shifted towards conservatism. Although he trained and practiced as a criminal lawyer, his literary career flourished through his contributions to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and his partnership with Theodore Martin on “The Book of Ballads,” a successful collection that parodied contemporary writers.
Aytoun is perhaps best known for his burlesque poem “Firmilian: Or, The Student of Badajoz, a Spasmodic Tragedy,” which satirized the romantic poetry of his time and inadvertently coined the term "spasmodic poetry." His tenure as chair of rhetoric and belles lettres at Edinburgh University helped revive the English literature program. Despite his literary achievements, Aytoun faced personal tragedies, including the death of his first wife in 1859, which led to a decline in his health and spirits. He remarried in 1863 but passed away in 1865. Aytoun's contributions to literature and his impact on Scottish poetry remain noteworthy.
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William Edmondstoune Aytoun
Poet
- Born: June 21, 1813
- Birthplace: Edinburgh, Scotland
- Died: August 4, 1865
- Place of death: Edinburgh, Scotland
Biography
William Edmondstoune Aytoun was born in 1813 in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he spent most of his life. His father, Roger Aytoun, was an influential lawyer of conservative convictions. His mother, Joan Keir Aytoun, was a committed Jacobite, who supported the descendants of King James II, the British king deposed in 1688. His mother also loved traditional Scots ballads and passed on her love to her son.
Aytoun entered the first class of the new Edinburgh Academy and later attended Edinburgh University, where he became interested in literature and completed his first volume of poetry, Poland, Homer, and Other Poems (1832). The title poem in the collection celebrated the Poles’ struggles for independence, a political position Aytoun later rejected as he grew more conservative. After graduation from college, Aytoun entered his father’s law firm, but his interests lay with literature and he spent some months in Germany, learning German and indulging his admiration for the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Although he began to hope for an academic career, he returned home to his father’s law firm. Called to the bar in 1840, he became a successful criminal lawyer.
Aytoun had established a connection with the conservative Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine after the publication accepted some of his poems in 1836. The following years saw more of his work in that journal. His interest in ballads led him to collaborate with Theodore Martin on The Book of Ballads (1845), an extremely successful collection of verse parodies satirizing what Aytoun and Martin considered to be the excesses of many contemporary writers, including Leigh Hunt and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The volume’s success led to Aytoun’s appointment as the chair of rhetoric and belles lettres at Edinburgh University, where his skill and enthusiasm as a lecturer revitalized a dying program and led the university to add the study of English literature to its graduation requirements.
The midcentury also saw the publication of some of Aytoun’s most successful short stories in Blackwood’s. His most significant literary achievement, however, was a burlesque dramatic poem, Firmilian: Or, The Student of Badajoz, a Spasmodic Tragedy (1854), which he wrote after publishing a mock review of the supposed work inBlackwood’s. In the review, Aytoun criticized T. Percy Jones, the putative author, coined the term “spasmodic poetry” for Jones’s work., and quoted liberally from the non-existent poem. When enthusiastic readers took the spoof seriously, Aytoun responded by writing the whole poem, a satire of the extravagances of late romanticism which gave the name Spasmodic School to a number of midcentury poets.
Aytoun’s later years were marked by increasing sadness. In 1859, Jane Wilson Aytoun, his wife of ten years died, leaving Aytoun childless and in low spirits and poor health. He remarried in 1863, to Ferne Jemima Kinnear. He died in 1865.