INTRODUCTION

Robert Burns (1759–96) quickly became a phenomenon after the publication of his Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect in 1786. The poems and songs of this edition appealed to a European-wide taste for primitive genius, and Burns, ‘this heaven-taught ploughman’ as Henry Mackenzie hailed him in a reputation-defining review, seemed to fit the bill perfectly. Burns, a tenant farmer from Ayrshire, wrote with gusto in Scots and with directness in emotion and wit, providing a rural portraiture that appealed to his contemporary audience as entirely authentic. Certainly, Burns’s work was rooted in his real-life culture and experience, but he was also a very literary artist. The stanzas of ‘Habbie Simson’ (found, for instance, in ‘To a Louse’) and ‘Christ’s Kirk’ (seen in use, for example, in ‘The Holy Fair’) were those established as Scottish cultural signatures during the earlier eighteenth century by his poetic predecessors, Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson. In bringing these forms to bear on his Presbyterian Ayrshire locus, Burns was transposing poetic technology associated with the Eastern and North-eastern parts of Scotland and an Episcopalian and even Catholic cultural outlook, involving carnivalesque anti-puritanism, anti-Unionism and Jacobitism. As well as this eighteenth-century Scots literary tradition, Burns also showed himself adept within a more ‘mainstream’ ‘British’ literary context, so that the elegant couplets and wry social satire of ‘The Twa Dogs’, for example, show a poet as steeped in the example of Alexander Pope as much as in Ramsay or Fergusson. Burns’s landscape painting owes much to the natural idiom established by Anglo-Scot James Thomson, author of The Seasons, and so again speaks of the broad eighteenth-century poetic palette in Burns’s hand.

If the Enlightenment’s taste for the supposedly primitive performer helped provide space for Burns, its cosmopolitan intellect influenced Burns’s treatment of history and psychology. Enlightenment historians were interested in treating with a new objectivity previously marginalized mindsets, and Burns imbibed this lesson so that he is one of the first writers to rehabilitate and even ventriloquize the sad plight of Mary, Queen of Scots (see ‘Lament of Mary Queen of Scots’). Before, a symbol of autocratic, female and Catholic depravity, Mary in Burns’s treatment emerges as someone to whom one might be psychologically sympathetic. From the other end of the religious and ideological spectrum, the Scottish Calvinist, hitherto a byword for dour fanaticism in British literature, emerges in Burns’s hand as a human being of spiritual and cultural wealth (see ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’). Burns’s often identified sympathy for humanity is, indeed, wide and ecumenical and is the product, more than anything, of an enlightened education, which is not to say that his satire does not equally stem from the same source. ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’, one of the great dramatic monologues of world literature, sees the poet lance the religious hypocrite with forensic psychology. ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, a poem that certainly draws on folk legend, is also a complex, barbed performance where a contemporary, ‘educated’ audience is invited to laugh at country superstition, even as Burns is signalling he knows that the salacious material he is providing will be lapped up by this same readership.