His second edition of poems and songs emerged from Edinburgh in 1787. Burns’s ‘Kilmarnock edition’ was a successful but modest venture, under-capitalized and under-marketed. Burns had only a decade in print, then, to secure his reputation: it was a remarkably influential ten year career. His death in July 1796 came almost precisely ten years after the appearance of his first volume of poetry, the ‘Kilmarnock Edition’ of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, in late July 1786. Robert Burns bequeathed a considerable amount of work to his successors. In this respect, Burns, like other early Romantic writers, initiates processes of argument and feeling which are developed rather than discovered by high Romantic poets. More significantly, as we shall see, Burns’s work not only weighed heavily upon those who followed, but itself offers a paradigm for the self-conscious reflection on poetic predecessors which characterizes many ‘Romantic’ poems. Robert Crawford is right to call Burns ‘an athletically transitional figure’ in this context, but in what ways might we revisit Robert Burns and think of him as a ‘Romantic’ or more precisely ‘Early Romantic’ writer? 3 There is certainly a chronological connection between Burns and British literary romanticism: Burns clubs toast his birth (25 January 1759) and wonder what might have been, had he not died in his thirties (on July 21 1796). A significant component of Burns’s legacy consists of his ability to manipulate the ‘true spring’ of poetic inheritance, even those rivulets we may think of as ‘Augustan’ or ‘sentimental’.
2 I will argue that ‘fine Romantic’ poets of the early nineteenth century were clearly influenced by Robert Burns and his Scottish poetic contemporaries and predecessors. 1 For Paterson however, if Burns was not a ‘Romantic’ poet neither was he an ‘Augustan’: ‘perhaps we should be grateful for what poetry he did manage to draw from the true spring before – and at how short a distance downstream – it was poisoned by the effluent of Augustan sentiment’. Robert Burns ‘was unfortunate not to have been born twenty years later’ suggests Don Paterson in his introduction to a 2001 selection of Burns’s verse, for ‘with far more stimulating company and better drugs, he would have made a fine Romantic’. November 2007, hosted on the ASLS website |
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