Allan Ramsay was born in the village of Leadhills in Lanarkshire, on 15th October 1684. The poet was educated at Crawfordmoor Parish School, but when his mother died in 1700, he moved to Edinburgh to study wig making, eventually opening a shop in the capital’s Grassmarket. He married Christian Ross in 1712, and their eldest son, Allan, became an eminent portrait painter.

In the early 1700s, Ramsay began writing poetry, and founded, with like-minded associates, Edinburgh’s Easy Club. Formed in the wake of the 1707 Union with England, the club had nationalist and Jacobite sympathies, and although Ramsay had no involvement in the 1715 and 1745 Risings, his support for the Stuart cause is evident throughout his work. Club members took pseudonyms from literary figures, and Ramsay is first included in records as Isaac Bickerstaff, after a character in Richard Steele’s Tatler. On the club’s decision to change to Scottish names, Ramsay next called himself Gavin Douglas, after the medieval author of the Aneados (1513), a Scots translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. These pseudonyms demonstrate Ramsay’s attraction to English Augustanism and Scots classicism, and illustrate two icons of his work.

Ramsay’s first volume was a blend of English language and Scots poems, printed by the Scoto-Latinist Walter Ruddiman, in 1721. By this time, Ramsay was an established man of letters, his work providing the foundation on which Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns were to build.

Around 1720, Ramsay abandoned the wig-making trade, setting up business as a bookseller. His shop, near Edinburgh’s Luckenbooths, became the first circulating library in Britain. The poet was by now fully engaged in writing verse and collecting and editing older Scots literature, and in 1724 he published the first volume of the Tea-Table Miscellany, a highly regarded and enduringly influential collection of Scottish song. In the same year, his The Ever Green amassed work of the medieval makars and of the seventeenth century.

Ramsay was famous during his lifetime as author of the Scots pastoral play, The Gentle Shepherd, which was published in 1725 and performed as a ballad-opera in 1729. On account of his interest in drama, Ramsay daringly opened a theatre in Edinburgh's Carruber’s Close. Calvinist objection to the theatre was fervent, and it was closed in 1737. Ramsay’s antagonism to Presbyterian dourness was thus further incensed, and he wrote numerous poems against what he perceived to be its hypocrisy.

Ramsay retired to a self-built house on Edinburgh’s Castlehill around 1740. His death on 7th January 1743 ended an innovative, genial and influential career. He is buried in Greyfriars Kirkyard.