James Arbuckle, Belfast-born poet and essayist, survives in the footnotes of better-known writers: the Scottish poet Allan Ramsay; Francis Hutcheson; and Jonathan Swift, whose work he criticized and parodied with such success that it has often been mistaken for Swift’s own. His neglect is due in part to his ambivalent national identity: not Scottish enough for a Scottish literary tradition that in any case has not much valued its “English” writers; in his native land neither part of Celtic “Hidden Ireland” nor of Yeats’s Anglo-Irish tradition.

Arbuckle was one of a generation of Irish Presbyterians who attended Glasgow University and developed the liberal “New Light” theology. He was at o

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First published 07 December 2007

Citation: holmes, richard. "James Arbuckle". The Literary Encyclopedia. 7 December 2007.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=137, accessed 21 November 2009.]