William Wilkie

William Wilkie (1721–1772) was born in West Lothian, the son of a farmer, and studied at Edinburgh. He became a minister of the Church of Scotland and later professor of natural philosophy at St Andrews, where he was known for his absent-minded habits and his love of the potato, which earned him the nickname Potato Willie.

His epic The Epigoniad (1757, enlarged in a second edition of 1759) retells the war of the Epigoni against Thebes in nine books of heroic couplets after Homer, and won him the name of the Scottish Homer. He also wrote Moral Fables in Verse (1768).