Major discussions of Romanticism since the 1960s have tended to be Anglocentric; they have reflected the political scene established within the British archipelago by the 1800s, when the Unions with Ireland, Scotland and Wales were all faits accomplis. That approach has undergone significant revision in recent years, however, and it is now conceded that among and within the four nations that made up the united kingdoms, the character of Romanticism varied, with cultural, or bardic, nationalism a significant feature of Romantic writing, particularly in Scotland, Wales and Ireland.

Where does James Orr ‘fit’ within this model? As we have seen, he is an accomplished and original Scots vernacular poet who was patriotically devoted to Ireland. However, his teachers were the great literati of the Scottish Enlightenment, while the influence of the English philosopher Locke, and of eighteenth-century English poets, such as Gray and Pope, may be readily detected in his work. Orr and his generation of Ulster Scots poets worked on the cusp of the era when, traditionally, Romanticism has been portrayed as confronting and superseding the Age of Enlightenment. But as a recent study of Romanticism has shown, ‘because of arguments that Romanticism makes a clear development out of rather than a radical break from Enlightenment ideas, we have begun to speak of a Romantic century that runs from 1750–1850’.