Reflecting on Burns

With the annual Burns celebrations just behind us, the question of what Burns represents to a 21st century Scotland is a topical one. For many people, Robert Burns is more than just a literary figure and he has long been a potent symbol of Scottishness to Scots and foreigners alike. But what does his writing mean to us today? David Robb, Senior Lecturer in the Department of English, reflects on how perceptions of Burns and his writing have continued to evolve.

If it is a sign of a great poet that he or she is thought of differently by each succeeding age - as Shakespeare has been, or Milton or... well, any big-name poet you care to think of - then Burns is one of the greatest. His own readers, or at least the genteel among them, thought of him as a working-class natural genius, 'a heaven-taught ploughman'. Pity that all his poems weren't thoroughly refined, though! His own country compeers saw him, more realistically, as one of themselves: ‘Rhymer Rab’. And perhaps even now ordinary Scots haven’t entirely lost sight of him as 'one of us', however little of his poetry is now familiar to them. Even so, I’ll bet more Scots can recite or name poems by Burns than your average English person could recite or name the poems of Wordsworth.

Literary folk, however, in Scotland or elsewhere, seem always to have had trouble seeing him squarely and free from their own agendas. The Romantics saw him as a genius who died early, squalidly and little recognised. To the Victorians he was an awful warning - the author of 'The Cotter's Saturday Night' clearly had sparks of purity and piety within him, but he also drank and womanised, then wrote cheerful poems boasting about it all. He wrote poems attacking ministers, too. Served him right that he died of drink (as the false legend had it).

And in the last century or so, the process of metamorphosing Scotland's most famous makar has continued. Catherine Carswell, accepting his sexuality as naturally as she accepted his literary talent, outraged just about everybody with her account of Burns as a kind of D H Lawrence. 'Hugh MacDiarmid' saw him as a kind of Hugh MacDiarmid, striving to transform the Scots into a people fit to appreciate poetic genius and crucified by the uphill struggle. The booziness of most of the other Scottish Renaissance poets meant that the author of 'Tam O'Shanter' and 'Scotch Drink' was always, in a sense, one of their number in Milne’s Bar - all the more welcome in that they didn’t have to stand him a drink. They were clear on one thing, though: Burns was at his best when he wrote poems in Scots. They were willing to ditch entirely his English verse, which seemed to confirm their theory that, for psychological reasons, Scottish poets could only express themselves in Scots.

Recent generations of literary academics (who could also, admittedly, occasionally be found tippling) helped broaden appreciation of Burns's variety, so that 'The Jolly Beggars' (an extremely scruffy crew much loathed by Matthew Arnold) were at last allowed in from the cold. And critics also began to point out that the complexity of Burns (which perhaps even this briefest of surveys is suggesting) implies that not only should he be seen as an early Romantic (with his projection of himself into his poems and his vigorous evocation of the everyday world), but also as a thoroughly eighteenth-century poet, well read in the best literature of his time and writing poems which must often be appreciated in terms of the tastes and canons of the Augustan age. His best and most ad hominem satires, which had never quite recovered from their exclusion (the magnificent 'The Holy Fair' apart) from the Kilmarnock volume of 1786, were now seen as central.

So, latterly, the emphasis has been on Burns and the complexities of his place in Scottish history and society, and also on the detailed craftsmanship and conscious sophistication of the poems themselves. The popular sense that he was always a man of the people finds its academic counterpart in the realisation that he was the product, not just of some mysterious divinely-granted genius, but of a rich world of folk poetry and tale-telling. His songs, a selection of which for long provided him with the entrée to church-hall gatherings and The White Heather Club (showing my age, there!), are now lauded as a whole and seen as, perhaps, his quintessence.

They have been mentioned, in at least one published fit of enthusiasm, in the same breath as Schubert's. And if the Saturday-night bawdiness of 'The Merry Muses' is not yet quite the first aspect of Burns one stresses to students, at least one doesn’t have to pretend anymore that it doesn’t exist. Increasingly, what one does have to mention to students, in order to be up-to-date, is the political side of Burns, where the most recent and innovative new work on him is being done. We are now offered 'new' poems by Burns anonymously expressing his radical side which the repression of the time (particularly relevant to someone like Burns in government employ) helped keep well hidden.

His energy is still with us, generating an endless sequence of 'Burns's' which will no doubt continue to unfold in the future.