Robert Burns and Ireland

Abstract This chapter builds on numerous studies of Robert Burns’s relationship with his neighboring island. Taken together, they have provided necessary complication, rather than resolution, of the questions that Burns poses in British, Irish, and Celtic cultural history. Based on discoveries arising from the revival of scholarly editing interest in Robert Burns, the chapter offers a detailed account of Burns’s contemporary relationship with Ireland on a literary, rather than merely political, level, examining the poet’s cooperation in cultural innovation and exchange with Irish contemporaries. In so doing, the legacy of ‘archipelagic identity’ and its inherent hierarchies are examined critically, emerging from the essentialist construction of Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries where Burns served as a nationalist cultural proxy. Through the radical legacy of Seamus Heaney’s later poetry, the chapter also examines Burns’s symbolic meaning in modern Ireland at a time when Irish unification is a real possibility. What is clear is that Burns meant, and still means, many things to his Irish audiences; a byword for fraternity, a focus for community identity, which is capable even of transcending the sectarian culture wars that have so often shaped Irish cultural discourse.