3/10/07 - English Literature - Robert Burns

Robert Burns and his work have been entangled in mythology, making him hard to study. It is hard to read his poems if the reader is not familiar with the Scottish dialect.

Carlyle was energetic about Burns. However he did not see the 'real' Burns, only his image. We must try to see Burns through the mythology and try to deduct it from around him.

There are three main characteristics of Burns's poetry. Firstly, their orality, i.e. they were supposed to be read aloud; the mixture of different traditions and ways of writing within individual poems; and "negative capability", or the fact that Burns effectively effaced his person out of reality and leaves only his work.

"[A] true Poet, a man in whose heart resides some effluence of Wisdom, some tone of the “Eternal Melodies”, is the most precious gift that can be bestowed upon a generation: we see in him a freer, purer development of whatever is noblest in ourselves; his life is a rich lesson to us; and we mourn his death as that of a benefactor who loved and taught us. Such a gift had Nature, in her bounty, bestowed on us in Robert Burns."
[Carlyle, ‘Robert Burns’ (1828)]

Carlyle chooses to emphasise Burns the man, his existence, as a specimen. Emphasis is also on nature: "nature bestows upon us Burns."

"All that remains of Burns, the writings he has left, seem to us, as we hinted above, no more than a poor mutilated fraction of what was in him; brief, broken glimpses of a genius that could never show itself complete; that wanted all things for completeness, nay, even length of life. His poems are, with scarcely any exception, mere occasional effusions; poured forth with little premeditation; expressing, by such means as offered, the passion, opinion, or humour of the hour. […] Let but the true poet be given us, we repeat it, place him where and how you will, and true poetry will not be wanting […]. Far more interesting than any of his written works, as it appears to us, are his acted ones: the Life he willed and was fated to lead among his fellow-men."
[Carlyle, ‘Robert Burns’ (1828)]

Carlyle here articulates that Burns was not a great craftsman because he wrote unpremeditated poems. Carlyle does not want Burns to change into a hard worker, a man who constantly edits his poetry, but wants him to remain a true genius, scribbling lines on the spur of the moment.

"A Scottish peasant’s life was the meanest and rudest of all lives, till Burns became a poet in it, and a poet of it; found it a man’s life, and therefore significant to men."
[Carlyle, ‘Robert Burns’ (1828)]

Carlyle states that the true poetry of Burns is not his poems, but the man's actions and his life.

In all these instances, Carlyle distances himself from Burns' poetry; he does not understand it. In today's age, everything can be a subject for poetry. Burns uses a Neoclassical poetic form: the ballad. The use of popular song as poetry threatened to overthrow the hierarchy of poetry as a high literary form.

"Is not every genius an impossibility until he appear? Why do we call him new and original, if we saw where his marble was lying, and what fabric he could rear from it? It is not the material but the workman that is wanting."
[Carlyle, ‘Robert Burns’ (1828)]

Carlyle dislikes the poetry of rural life, of everyday people. Carlyle and Burns' assumptions of poetry are fundamentally different. Carlyle sees Burns as a naive, unmeditated poet; he believes that art comes naturally, that the artist is an artist, not a producer of works of art. For Carlyle, the artist is what makes his art interesting.

Burns' genius was in marketing himself. He created himself in the eighteenth-century ideal. Burns' crafting of poetic identity met the expectations of his era.

In the early Enlightenment, Bacon appeared as the arch-empiricist.

"Poesy is a part of learning in measure of words, for the most part restrained, but in all other points extremely licensed, and doth truly refer to the imagination."
[Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605)]

Here, poetry and imagination are linked. Poetry is the physical aspect of human nature. According to seventeenth-century philosophy of history, poetry belongs to the primitive, uncivilised world. Vico was the founder of this idea.

"In seeking the basic principle of the common origins of languages and letters, we find that the first peoples of pagan antiquity were, by a demonstrable necessity of their nature, poets, who spoke by means of poetic symbols. […] Their symbols were certain imaginative general categories, or archetypes. […] These archetypes […] were created by people endowed with vigorous imaginations but feeble powers of reasoning. So they prove to be true poetic statements, which are feelings clothed in powerful passions, and thus filled with sublimity and arousing wonder."
[Vico, The New Science (1725)]

Imaginative poetry is opposed to rationality, just as primitive man lacked reason and rationality.

"The most just and comprehensive definition which, I think, can be given of Poetry, is 'that it is the language of passion, or of enlivened imagination, formed, most commonly, into regular numbers'. The Historian, the Orator, the Philosopher, address themselves, for the most part, primarily to the understanding: their direct aim is to inform, to persuade, or to instruct. But the primary aim of a Poet is to please, and to move; and, therefore, it is to the Imagination, and the Passions, that he speaks. He may, and he ought to have it in his view, to instruct and to reform; but it is indirectly, and by pleasing and moving, that he accomplishes this end. His mind is supposed to be animated by some interesting object which fires his Imagination, or engages his Passions; and which, of course, communicates to his style a peculiar elevation suited to his Ideas; very different from that mode of expression, which is natural to the mind in its calm, ordinary state."
[Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783)]

The purpose of poetry is to please and move the audience, to engage the passions and elevate the mind of man above its ordinary state. The poet is like any man, simply more sensitive and passionate.

Burns adopted the persona of the 'ploughman poet', of the passionate, simple man. Burns adopts the highly crafted, rhetorical, modesty topos to nature, rather than addressing the Muses.

"The Simple Bard, unbroken by
rules of Art,
He pours his wild effusions of
the heart:
And if inspir’d, ‘tis Nature’s
pow’rs inspire;
Her’s all the melting thrill, and
her’s the kindling fire."
[Robert Burns, Poems, Chiefly in the Scots Dialect (1786) (Kilmarnock edition)]

The line "unbroken by rules of Art" articulates Burns' aim to use rhetorical forms to create "artless" poetry. However, if we look at Burns' poetry deeper we can see that they are far from artless.

There are three main characteristics of Burns' poetry: orality, mixture and negative capability.

Orality is the foremost of these. Orality is one aspect of performance, for it shows that the poems are meant to be read aloud, and it recreates Burns' speech. He uses stanza form to give human characterisation to the voice of the narrator.

"O Lord my God, that glib-tongu'd Aiken!
My very heart and flesh are quaking
To think how I sat, sweating, shaking,
And piss'd wi' dread,
While Auld wi' hingin lip gaed sneaking
And hid his head!"
[Robert Burns, from "Holy Willie's Prayer", (1789)]

The poem is a satire on a hypocrite. It is informal, hesitant, colloquial, emphasised by metric pattern to give an informal effect.

"Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi' bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee
Wi' murd'ring pattle!

I'm truly sorry Man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle,
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An' fellow mortal!"
[Robert Burns, from "To a Mouse" 1785]

The first verse of the poem uses Anglo-Scots vocabulary such as "pattle", and moves to a higher style in the second verse, seemingly to reflect on the gap between culture (English language) and nature (the mouse). He maintains the English proprietary form and the same stanza forms throughout the poem.

The second most distinctive feature of Burns' poetry is his great skill for mixing different traditions. For example, in the following:

"O my Luve's like a red, red rose,
That's newly sprung in June;
O my Luve's like the melodie
That's sweetly played in tune.

As fair thou art, my bonie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will love thee still, my Dear,
Till a' the seas gang dry.

Till a' the seas gang dry, my Dear,
And the rocks melt wi' the sun:
O I will love thee still, my Dear,
While the sand o' life shall run.

And fare thee weel, my only Luve!
And fare thee weel, a while!
And I will come again, my Luve,
Tho' it were ten thousand mile!
[Robert Burns, "A Red, Red Rose" (1796)]

None of the poem is original; it is a rewritten pre-existing Edinburgh poem. It is a conventional love lyric converted to the Scottish dialect. Burns uses repetition for emphasis. He juxtaposes Scottish enlightenment ideas with universality.

"No other eighteenth-century vernacular poet managed Burns’s seamless synthesis of a variety of traditions (English and Scots, folk and bardic, Augustan and sentimental). […] Like most eighteenth-century poets and also like Shakespeare (that last comparison is often, and justly, made), Burns seldom originated his themes, sentiments or verse-forms. He worked instead, as poets do, to incorporate all he knew of the literary past. But he transfigures inherited conventions by choosing to transmit them in his heterodoxical, radically ‘mixed’, language."
[Carol McGuirk, ‘Scottish Hero, Scottish Victim: Myths of Robert Burns’, in The History of Scottish Literature, vol. 2: 1660-1800]

Another example of this is "Tam O’Shanter", in which Burns begins in a moralising high style, in the voice of a drunken Scots man talking about racy subjects, and then the narrator seems to crack under pressure and the influence of his drunkenness and breaks out into an earthy Scots dialect. Burns had fluency in both styles; he doubtless liked to show off.

The third things that stands out about Burns' poetry is "negative capability". That is, the poet is not present in his poems at all. He values imitation rather than originality in poetry. For example, Burns uses songs and ballads as poetical types, emulating the so-called "Emoclassical." The poet takes on the persona of other characters, such as the ploughman. Burns uses juxtaposition and contrast of different styles, and his fluency in this is also a sign of negative capability. The work of art is merely a fusion of opposites. The formal elements of poetry work against and with the voice of the character. Burns even stopped publishing poetry under his own name, and became anonymous because of his radical political views. But it is also a symbolic action: he essentially effaced himself from the public sphere. He wanted his poetry to be the focus rather than himself, the man, the genius. So Thomas Carlyle got him all wrong.