by Robert Burns
Burns’s poetry offers a gold mine of contestation among Scottish, English, classic, European, and non-European matters — a wondrous intertextuality of quotations, traditions, dictions, idioms, dialects, languages, meanings. His texts do not produce, I suggest, the agonistic of conflicted tongues heard by Thomas Crawford nor the Smollettian dialect of synthesized literary traditions sought by Carol McGuirk. Instead they orchestrate a polyphony of voices contesting languages, literary traditions, and cultures. Burns’s poetic project is dialogical through and through, internally within and between poems and externally within and between Scottish and other cultures. It scripts a future Scottish national culture that is inherently diverse — an imagined community whose lack of uniformity would appal Tobias Smollett, whose last and dying years, despite his anglicizing in aid of a sublated British culture, nevertheless were spent, perhaps fittingly, outside of Britain. Kenneth Simpson has written the most persuasively, I think, of Burns’s varying roles and poses, a poetic strategy he considers a reflection of the protean eighteenth-century Scot undergoing the dissociation of sensibility caused by the Union. Burns, he thinks, ‘became trapped behind the roles he so readily created’. I would suggest instead that these roles register the rich profusion of personal and cultural possibilities, opportunities, and identities made available to both individuals and Scottish society by the dialogic — indeed postmodern — world Burns’s poetic project scripts. This paper serves merely to suggest the many possibilities for exploration that Burns’s dialogism offers. Alan Bold misleadingly argues that Burns ‘looked back in ecstasy and did not take the future of Scotland into account’. It can be argued that dominant Scottish discourse since the Union has instead looked back in ecstasy while enacting the literati’s rather than Burns’s implied national script, and this possibility may cause some subconscious guilt that the ‘great tartan monster’ and the annual Burns Supper orgies seek to absolve. If this is so, tartanry and toasts to the ‘Immortal Memory’ yet also serve to keep alive the possibility of attending to Burns’s script.90
Preston’s essay is a deeply perceptive and provocative argument in favour of Burns creating a sort of healthily open, dialogically energised Scottish literature which was in opposition to the integration of Scottish writing into the standardised language, envisaged by such as the Irishman Thomas Sheridan and advocated by Edmund Burke and James Boswell, of the Anglo-British empire. Burns knew and loathed the power and accent of the Scots who served that imperium: ‘Thou Eunuch of language—Thou Englishman who was never south of the Tweed —Thou servile echo of fashionable barbarisms’. Henry Dundas would be the prime example of that category though he, according to a jealous Boswell, had hardly the capacity to put pen to paper. Preston’s account requires only the modification that the relationship with English literature in the 1790s was not only dialogical but collusive in that these writers were seeking a republican reorientation of the British state through the resurrected democratic nationalism of its English, Scottish, Irish parts. The failure of this ambition is, as we shall see, tragically embodied in Ode for General Washington’s Birthday. Though, as Preston notes, two hundred years later we seem to be entering similar territory. It is the primary impulse behind this edition, then, to make Burns available to a contemporary Scottish consciousness that is hopefully more openly responsive to the man, his values and, above all, his poetry than has largely been the case over the last two centuries.
NOTES
1 See John Strawhorn, ‘Farming in 18th-century Ayrshire’, in Collections of the Ayrshire Archeological and Natural History Society, 2nd Series, III (1955), pp. 136–73.
2 See J. De Lancey Ferguson The Pride and the Passion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939), p. 114.
3 See John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State 1688–1783 (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 101–14.
4 Roy Porter, The Pelican Social History of Britain: English Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Penguin, 1982), p. 30.
5 Robert Morrison, ‘Red De Quincey’, The Wordsworth Circle, Vol. 28, 1998, pp. 131–6.
6 Donald Low, Robert Burns: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1974), pp. 421–30.
7 Ibid., p. 429.
8 James Mackay, RB: A Biography of Robert Burns (Edinburgh Mainstream, 1992), p. 519.
9 David Cannadine, ‘The Making of the British Upper Class’ in Aspects of Aristocracy (London: Penguin, 1994), pp. 9–36.
10 John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life (London: Bloomsbury, 1995), p. 54.
11 See Stephen C. Behrendt, Romanticism, Radicalism and the Press (University of Nebraska, 1997), p. 14.
12 Fintan O’Toole, A Traitor’s Kiss: The Life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan (London: Granta, 1997), pp. 31–2.
13 J.R. Dinwiddy, ‘Conceptions of Revolution in the English Radicalism of the 1790s’ in Radicalism and Reform in Britain, 1780–1850, ed. H.T. Dickinson, (London: The Hambledon Press, 1992,) p. 169.
14 John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, ‘Cato’s Letters’ in The English Libertarian Heritage, ed. David L. Jacobson (San Francisco: Fox & Wilkes, 1994), p. 42.
15 Ibid. pp. 53–4.
16 Ibid.p. 63.
17 Michael Durey, Transatlantic Radicals and the Early American Republic (University of Kansas, 1997), pp. 50–79. The Life and Letters of Alexander Wilson, ed. Clark Hunter (Philadelphia, American Philosophical Society, 1983).
18 John Thelwall, The Politics of English Jacobinism, ed. Gregory Claeys (Pennsylvania State U.P., 1995), p. 40.
19 See Francis Hutcheson, Short Introduction, 5th edn (Philadelphia, 1799), pp. 289–92.
20 Richard Rorty, ‘Afterword: Pragmatism, Pluralism and Postmodernism’ in Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 265.
21 Cynthia Ozick, ‘From the Book of Job’, (New York: Vintage Spiritual Classics, 1998), pp. xx–xxi.
22 Love and Liberty, ed. K.G. Simpson (Edinburgh: Tuckwell Press, 1997), p. 179.
23 Edwin Muir, ‘Robert Burns’ in Edwin Muir: Uncollected Scottish Criticism, ed. Andrew Noble (London/New York, 1982), p. 183.
24 Roger Fechner, ‘Burns and American Liberty’ in Love and Liberty, p. 278.
25 E.W. McFarlane, Ireland and Scotland in the Age of Revolution (Edinburgh University Press, 1994), p. 136.
26 The Critical Heritage, p. 16.
27 Henry Mackenzie, ‘Three Scottish Poets’ in The Anecdotes and Egotisms of Henry Mackenzie, ed. H.W. Thompson (Oxford University Press, 1927), pp. 150–2.
28 Literature and Literati: The Literary Correspondence and Notebooks of Henry Mackenzie, Vol. 2, ‘Letters 1766–1827’, ed. Horst W. Drescher, (Frankfurt, 1989), p. 358.
29 Ibid., p. 358.
30 Ibid., p. 172.
31 Ibid., p. 74.
32 Ibid., p. 175.
33 Ibid., p. 178.
34 T.M. Devine, The Scottish Nation 1700–2000 (London: The Penguin Press, 1999), p. 215.
35 Edinburgh University Library, Laing Collection, II, folio 269. Two other Heron letters in folio 500–501.
36 Robert Heron, A Memoir of the Life of the Late Robert Burns (Edinburgh, 1797). Reprinted in Hans Hecht, Robert Burns: The Man and His Work (London: William Hodge & Co., 1936), pp. 335–6.
37 Ibid., p. 326.
38 Ibid., pp. 338–9.
39 Ibid., pp. 344–5.
40 Ian Hamilton, ‘The Frailties of Robert Burns’ in Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography (Boston/London: Faber & Faber, 1992), p. 101.
41 A Memoir of the Life of Robert Burns, p. 346.
42 Edinburgh University Library, Laing Collection, III, folio 586.
43 ‘The Frailties of Robert Burns’, p. 93.
44 Quoted in R.D. Thornton, James Currie: The Entire Stranger & Robert Burns (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1963), p. 358.
45 ‘The Frailties of Robert Burns’, p. 98.
46 ‘The Frailties of Robert Burns’, p. 101.
47 Low, The Critical Heritage, p. 431.
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48 In 1793, Currie had written a Francophile, abrasively anti-Pitt pamphlet under the pseudonym, ‘Jasper Wilson’. In consequence he considered American exile and lived in terror of disclosure. See Chapter 9, ‘Dissenter’ in Thornton’s The Entire Stranger.
49 ‘The Frailties of Robert Burns’, p. 97.
50 Low, The Critical Heritage, p. 152.
51 Ibid., p. 144.
52 Andrew Noble, ‘Versions of Scottish Pastoral’ in Order in Space and Society: Architectural Form and Its Context in the Scottish Englightenment, ed. Thomas Marcus (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1982), pp. 288–91.
53 Low, Critical Heritage, p. 194.
54 Ibid., pp. 186–7.
55 Ibid., p. 181.
56 Ibid., p. 182.
57 Ibid., p. 183.
58 Ibid., p. 183.
59 Ibid., pp. 183–4.
60 Ibid., p. 181.
61 Ibid., p. 180.
62 Ibid., p. 195.
63 While this, revealingly, was not published till 1842 it was written between 1793 and 1794. This is the Advertisement to Guilt and Sorrow or Incidents Upon Salisbury Plain. Poetical Works of Wordsworth (Oxford University Press, 1956), pp. 18–19.
64The Life and Works of Robert Burns, as originally ed. by James Currie, to which is prefixed a review of its life of Burns and of various criticisms of his character and writings (Edinburgh: Macredie, Skelly and Muckersy, 1815), p. vii.
65 Andrew Noble, ‘Burns and Scottish Nationalism’, in Burns Now (Edinburgh: Canongate Academic, 1994), pp. 167–92.
66 ‘The Burns Cult and Scottish Identity in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’ in Love and Liberty, p. 72.
67 Patrick Kavanagh: Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 1996) pp. 70–1. While Moore was not of Burns’s militant spirit we are now also realising the degree to which his songs are coded expressions of the bloodier Irish political turmoil of the 1790s and arguably, an embryonic assertion of new national forces. See Matthew Campbell ‘Thomas Moore’s Wild Song: The 1821 Irish Melodies’. Bullán, Vol.v. No. 2, pp. 83–104.
68 Saul Bellow, ‘Mozart: An Overture’ in It All Adds Up (London, Secker and Warburg, 1994), pp. 9–10.
69 Matthew Arnold, Letter of November 1879, quoted in Selected Poems and Prose, ed. Miriam Allott (London: Everyman, 1991), p. 295.
70 Ibid., 262–3.
71 T.S. Eliot, ‘Was there a Scottish Literature?’, The Athenaeum, No. 4657, 1st Aug. 1919, pp. 680–1.
72 Letter 2315, The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, Vol. 7, ed. Booth and Mehew (Yale University Press, 1995). p. 110.
73 R.L. Stevenson ‘Review of The Poets and Poetry of Scotland’, ed. James Grant Wilson, The Academy, 12 Feb., 1876, p. 30.
74 Ibid., p. 31.
75 For Stevenson’s profound ambivalence to Burns see Letter 635, Vol. 1, The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. In the same volume (Letter 424) there is a project for not only a book about Ramsay, Fergusson and Burns, but a book that would use Villon as context. He never really synthesised his Scottish roots with his Francophilia.
76 Edwin Muir, ‘Burns and Holy Willie’ in Edwin Muir: Uncollected Scottish Criticism (London/New York: Vision, 1982), pp. 189–90.
77 Ibid., pp. 191–2.
78 ‘Burns and Baudelaire’ in Hugh MacDiarmid: The Raucle Tongue, ed. Calder, Murray, Riach (Manchester: Carcanet, 1996), p. 69.
79 The Complete Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid, Vol. 2, ed. Grieve and Aitken (London: Penguin, 1985), p. 1224.
80 ‘The Burns Cult’, in Hugh MacDiarmid: Selected Prose, ed. Riach (Manchester: Carcanet, 1992), p. 82.
81 Ibid., p. 84. MacDiarmid’s most sustained polemic against the Burns Federation and Cult can be found in Burns Today and Tomorrow (Edinburgh: Castle Wynd Printers Ltd, 1959).
82 The Complete Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid, Vol. 1, pp. 693–4. This can be compared to the much more in your face ‘Your Immortal Memory, Burns!’, pp. 77–9.
83 ‘Burns and Baudelaire’, pp. 70–1.
84 ‘Robert Burns’ in A Channel Passage, and Other Poems (London, 1904).
85 ‘The Neglect of Byron’ in The Raucle Tongue, Vol. 1, p. 77.
86 Some qualification for this is to be found in Burns Today and Tomorrow where MacDiarmid does address the politics of the 1790s and compares the French and Russian Revolutions, pp. 105–10.
87 Iain Crichton Smith, ‘The Golden Lyric’ in Towards the Human (Edinburgh: Macdonald, 1986), pp. 176–91.
88 ‘The Neglect of Byron’, p. 76.
89 W. H. Auden, ‘Light Verse’ in The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings 1927–1939 (London: Faber & Faber, 1977), p. 367.
90 ‘Contrary Scriptings: Implied National Narratives in Burns and Smollett’ in Love and Liberty, p. 213.
Editorial Policy and Practice
As we have seen in our Introduction, nineteenth-century editors were seriously remiss, with varied degrees of ignorance and prejudice, in providing a proper context for the poems and the politically fractious culture out of which they emerged. One could simply not expect any knowledgeable enthusiasm for a revolutionary, democratic Burns given the victory of the British Old Regime during the ideological war of the 1790s, so complete was it that it virtually wiped the radical struggle from national memory. Towards the end of the century, the Henley–Henderson edition of 1896 brought Burns editorship to a nadir by combining Henley’s rampant right-wing jingoism with a deliberate policy of ‘correcting’ the poet’s spelling, punctuation and stresses according to modern standards. Burns’s distinctive habit of spelling place and proper names in capitals, italicising idioms and ironies and his use of long dashes are virtually all purged from their edition. This constant, careless editorial meddling seriously disrupts the intelligible rhythm of the poems by an accelerated ‘streamlining’ of the reading process so that the poet’s voice is significantly diminished.
In the twentieth century we had the heroic scholarship of the American, Professor J. De Lancey Ferguson, with his edition of the letters. This, as his correspondence with Catherine Carswell shows,1 was achieved with, at best, the non-cooperation of the then Scottish Burns establishment. Despite his great scholarly virtues, De Lancey Ferguson was not sufficiently equipped in either the political history of ideas or comparative Romantic scholarship to provide the letters and their recipients with the literary and political context needed to bring Burns into fuller focus, although he did begin down this road with his last essay, the largely unknown but brilliant critique on previous editorship, They Censored Burns.2 Sadly, Oxford’s expensive re-edition of the letters in 1985 arguably achieved its most significant addition by appending Professor G. Ross Roy’s name as editor.
The three-volume Oxford edition of Burns: Songs and Poems (1968) by James Kinsley, is by far the most important edition of the poems. He lists a formal number of 605 poems and songs within the canon. However, several works are counted by him under a number with sub-categories, 100A, 100B, and so on. This means he accepts 621 poems, songs and fragments to the canon. This is increased further by the poems within Kinsley’s Dubia section – those works he could not properly date in terms of composition. Hence, the overall Kinsley total is around 630, with a few marked as ‘probably’ authentic.
There is, however, among his extensive, indeed, apparently exhaustive quarrying of Burns’s poetry for the poet’s quite enormous range of allusion to English, Scottish, Folk and, not least, Biblical sources, a degree of exhibitonist erudition. One really doubts that even so much a poet’s poet as Burns (the very reverse of the limited ploughman) had access to such esoteric texts. Given that qualification, this new edition is everywhere marked by Kinsley’s scholarly presence. As with Carol McGuirk’s excellent Robert Burns: Selected Poems (Penguin, 1993), we have everywhere tried to acknowledge our specific debts. While Kinsley is almost Olympian in erudition, the same cannot be said of his degree of detachment. Though less obviously so, his edition carries many of the omissions and prejudices of nineteenth-century scholars.
Kinsley, essentially, was a conservative eighteenth-century scholar with neither patience for nor understanding of Romantic radical poetics. It may be that such wilful obscuritanism in Kinsley is part of a much larger pattern prevailing in British literary criticism. David Norbrook, in a recent study of seventeenth-century English poetry3 argues that there is an in-built, repressive prejudice in our national literary criticism to prefer a royalist over a republican poetics. He comments that the memory of republican poetry had been ‘kept at bay by a cordon sanitaire of defensive ridicule’. The parallel between the bloody crucible of the mid-seventeenth century and the political tumult of the 1790s should be obvious from our introduction with relevance to Burns and Scotland and what was subsequently done to him.
In his Warton lecture to the British Academy on 23 January 1974, Kinsley summarised what he had learned from his work on Burns. Thus he wrote:
Indeed, the deep spring of his finest poetry was not literary at all – not even the vernacular tradition – but what he called his ‘social disposition’; a heart ‘completely tinder and … eternally lighted up by some Goddess or other’ and a ‘strong appetite for sociability’ … This appetite led him often into ‘scenes of swaggering riot and roaring dissipation’ … It also gave him the chance and capacity to see the rustic society about him with the sympathy and critical clarity of a Breughel; to write some of the most natural and generous verse letters in the language; and give to the world some of its best songs.4
The implications of his bizarre conclusions are not those to induce confidence in his editorial vision or practices, coming from an editor whose perhaps over-laden commentary annotates the extraordinary degree of Burns’s allusiveness to other poetry. From the evidence of his poetry and letters he is about as unliterary as James Joyce. Indeed, from further remarks, it would seem Kinsley’s intention was to keep Burns’s poetry marginalised on the rural farm, isolated from his English contemporaries and de-politicised.