Byron is customarily thought of as an English poet and not infrequently claimed as a Scottish poet but, despite Matthew Arnold's insistence that the ‘Celtic passion of revolt’ is titanically embodied in Byron, he is not normally thought of as a Celtic poet. This volume prompts us to ask if there is any useful sense in which he might be thought to be one, and whether Byron himself entertained this possibility?

A passage in Byron's last major poem, The Island (1823), seems to give a wholly positive answer to our second query:

Byron recalls in these lines the first ten years of his life in Aberdeen where he wore the Gordon tartan of his mother's clan and felt ‘at home with the people lowland & Gael’. Especially he recalled his summer holidays, from the ages of eight to ten, at the farmhouse of Ballaterich on Deeside. Here he rambled on hill and mountains, such as Loch na Garr, swam, and heard Gaelic spoken. When he was at Cambridge, he wrote a poem, ‘The Adieu. written under the impression that the author would soon die’. This poem identified the sources of his personality and Muse as Harrow, Cambridge, the Highlands, Newstead Abbey and Southwell.