He was born in
Lerwick,
Shetland, on 16 January 1866. He was the son of Andrew John Grierson and his wife, Alice Geraldine (
née Clifford) Grierson. In 1896 he married Mary Letitia (née Ogston) Grierson, daughter of Sir
Alexander Ogston, Professor of Surgery at Aberdeen. They had five daughters including Molly Dickins, author of
A Wealth of Relations, about family history, writer Flora Grierson who co-founded the
Samson Press, and writer and pianist
Janet Teissier du Cros. He was educated at
King's College,
University of Aberdeen and
Christ Church, Oxford. On graduating from the latter he was appointed Professor of
English Literature at his Aberdeen
alma mater, where he taught from 1894 to 1915, and subsequently became Knight Professor of English Literature at the
University of Edinburgh (1915–1935). In 1938, he was a visiting professor on the
William Allan Neilson foundation at Smith College. In 1920 he delivered the
British Academy's Warton Lecture on English Poetry. He is known for promoting interest in the
Metaphysical Poets especially
John Donne, a revival supported by
T. S. Eliot and
Helen Gardner. He wrote in his memoir
Vita Mea: ‘By [1909] I was launched on what was to be my
magnum opus, the poems of John Donne. This grew quite directly out of my work on the seventeenth century. I had hardly finished this work and had contributed to a series a small selection from Tennyson with an introduction (1907), when I was asked by the editor of the
Cambridge History of English Literature, the Master of Peterhouse, to write for the volume of the history then in preparation the chapters on John Donne and on the English Bible. Donne had been a growing interest to me while at work both on my lectures and on the volume just referred to, so for a short time I dallied with both proposals, but ultimately resolved to confine myself to the first. 'Editing Donne’s poems was not unlike editing the poems of one of the ancients, more so than would be the case in dealing with almost any other English poet after the Middle English period. None of his poems, except the two
Anniversaries, had been printed during his lifetime. They were contained in a series of editions each of which tended in some degree to corrupt the text, and to add poems which might or might not be by Donne. My business was therefore to settle the canon and the text. Despite the interruptions involved by my work on the
English Parnassus, I managed to complete the poems in two volumes in 1912 – text and commentary.’ His special field of research was English poetry of the 17th century, but he was also interested in
Walter Scott, and in 1934, published the "
Letters of Sir Walter Scott", in six volumes. ==Personal life==