What years did Sorley MacLean live?
Sorley MacLean
For 1,500 years, Scottish Gaelic literature had developed a rich corpus of song and poetry across "literary, sub-literary, and non-literate" registers; it retained the ability to convey "an astonishingly wide range of human experience".[35]:392-3 MacLean's work drew on this "inherited wealth of immemorial generations";[35]:393 according to MacInnes, few people were as intimately familiar with the entire corpus of Gaelic poetry, written and oral, as MacLean.[35]:416 In particular, MacLean was inspired by the intense love poetry of William Ross, written in the eighteenth century.[36]:67 Of all poetry, MacLean held in highest regard the Scottish Gaelic songs composed before the nineteenth century by anonymous, illiterate poets and passed down via the oral tradition.[3][8]:17[35]:397 He once said that Scottish Gaelic song-poetry was "the chief artistic glory of the Scots, and of all people of Celtic speech, and one of the greatest artistic glories of Europe".[8]:17