Burns, Robert

At the conclusion of the Preface to the first edition ofPoems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, Robert Burns requests a fair evaluation from his readers, particularly the ‘Learned and Polite’. If his volume is founding wanting, he suggests, his readers should treat him the way he would treat any other poet guilty of ‘Dulness and Nonsense’: ‘let him be condemned, without mercy, to contempt and oblivion’. With Burns Clubs existing from Prague to Rio de Janeiro and Burns celebrations occurring every 25 January, Burns is hardly the victim of oblivion. In fact, he enjoys a reputation unprecedented for any poet, living or dead. But it is only relatively recently that Burns has begun to be reconsidered in the context of Romantic‐era writing. This is in part due to the fact that he has been identified as a figure of popular rather than academic interest. But it is also due to the fact that his work is difficult to characterize. In many ways his interests in the poetics of locality, the ‘common man’ and the natural world coincide with the concerns of other writers of the late eighteenth century, and, indeed, his work was highly influential on other Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge. But much of his work also reflects Scottish Enlightenment influences, in particular a focus on sociability and social structures. Moreover, Burns's poetry and songs straddle a number of cultural divides, being at once indebted to English literature, the Scottish poetic tradition, and Scottish oral culture; indeed, his work deliberately intermingles these various elements in an attempt to call into question the dominance of English language and literature. He creates in his poetry and songs an ‘imagined community’ of Scotland while resisting the representation of a Scottish nation that is pure and uncomplicated.