John Scott of Amwell
John Scott of Amwell (1731–1783) was an English landscape gardener and writer on social issues. He is remembered as the first notable Quaker poet, best known today for the anti-war poem The Drum.
He was the son of a successful London draper who later became a maltster at Amwell House in Great Amwell, Hertfordshire. The Scott family were Quakers; his elder brother Samuel became a Quaker minister. From 1760, John Scott worked on improving the grounds at Amwell House, imitating William Shenstone’s Leasowes. A major feature was a grotto with six subterranean rooms decorated with flints, shells and minerals. His poem The Garden argues for a natural, managed wilderness rather than a formal garden. Samuel Johnson admired the garden, saying only a poet could make such a place. The grotto remained a tourist draw into the Victorian era and was restored in 1991.
Scott had little formal schooling and learned poetry through a self-taught bricklayer friend. He married that man’s daughter, Sarah Frogley, in 1767; she died in childbirth the next year. In 1770 he married Maria De Horne, with whom he had a daughter named Maria.
In 1773 he published Observations on the present state of the parochial and vagrant poor, a critical look at the Poor Law; the ideas were well received but not turned into law. He also wrote A Digest of the Highway and General Turnpike Laws (1773; expanded in 1778), and was active in three Hertfordshire turnpike trusts, later praised as “the ablest Turnpike Trustee of his time.” Another pamphlet, The Constitution Defended, responded to Samuel Johnson’s False Alarm (1770).
Scott began visiting London around 1760, where he met John Hoole, who introduced him to Johnson. Though they disagreed politically, Johnson liked him and planned to write his life, a project that never came to fruition due to Johnson’s death. Scott died of a fever during a London visit in 1783.
After his death, his Critical Essays on several English Poets appeared in 1785, along with a life of him by Hoole. These works were meant to offer a corrective view to Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. Scott wrote late at night in a dark room, then copied his lines by candlelight.
His early poems include Four Elegies descriptive and moral (1760), which describe the seasons in cross-rhymed quatrains and offended Johnson. In 1776 he published Amwell, a descriptive poem in blank verse about the countryside that gave him his later nickname. He followed with Moral Eclogues (1778) and the collected Poetical Works (1782).
The book’s portrait was not a true likeness, and Blake contributed two vignettes and two oval plates. Scott’s poetry is detailed and varied, with many literary and geographical references, including responses to Mark Akenside, a sonnet on Shenstone’s elegies, and works like the Mexican Prophecy and Oriental Eclogues set in Arabia, India and China.
The Drum remains his most remembered poem, an anti-war ode that starts “I hate that drum’s discordant sound.” It has been set to music multiple times in the 20th and 21st centuries by composers such as Benjamin Frankel, Ned Rorem, William F. Funk, and Robert Rival.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 12:46 (CET).