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Soutar's Life

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Soutar's room

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Reflections

Soutar was a Perth man, but also a poet and writer of national stature. His reputation has grown steadily from the assessment of Alexander Reid that he was clearly a minor poet (Scotland's Magazine, September 1954) to Joy Hendry's "I firmly believe that Soutar's diary writings put him into the rank of the great diarists of the world" (The Diary of a Dying Man, 1991).

View to the garden

Carl MacDougall and Douglas Gifford, in their introduction to Into a Room: Selected Poems of William Soutar (2000), state that Soutar "is one of the greatest poets Scotland has produced" and dismiss the notion that he lies in the shadow of MacDairmid.

The literary critics may differ, but Soutar's range of work as a Scottish poet is genuinely wide and significant.

He will repay your time in perception, sensitivity, laughter and tears. We commend him to you.

Detail from the window Soutar House.