Have you heard this old tale about Paisley? 100 guests once attended a public dinner, where someone proposed a toast to ‘the poet of Paisley’ – and 99 of those assembled promptly stood up to receive the toast. The story is a joke, of course, but it illustrates a fascinating period in Paisley’s history, when the town was as much associated with poetry as it was with patterned cloth.
Robert Brown’s 1889 book filled two volumes and included 220 poets. Perhaps even more surprising is that, far from being classically educated gentlemen, most of these poets were simple artisans, with a large number of them being handloom weavers. They range from the popular Robert Tannahill, who was once considered second only to Burns as a Scottish nature
