Burns Love Life

 

Margaret Chambers

Burns love life is highly complex and complicated!  He wrote some of the most famous love songs ever written. He loved often. His first famous poem, written when Burns was sixteen was Westlin Winds for Peggy. 

As a teenager he fell in love often, after reading a book of French love letters given to him by mistake by his tutor John Murdoch! Burns’s first child, Elizabeth Burns was born to his mother’s servant Elizabeth Paton. 

There was the Mauchline Belles! Many years later when he was twenty two, Burns moved to Mossgiel farm near Mauchline in 1782, where he met his bonny Jean. She was a great singer and knew all the auld Scots ballads like his mother. 

At this time he also met his Highland Mary: after Jean suddenly left for Paisley. He pledged his love for her over a bible and later wrote the poems Highland Mary and To Mary in Heaven to her. Also – “Will ye go to the Indies, my Mary, And leave auld Scotia’s shore?” However Mary suddenly died in Greenock from Typhus, she had contracted from her uncle. Burns was devastated.  Machine was a crossroads town, with many travellers and walks fo life. 

Burns also greatly enjoyed educated, cultured women he met on his travels, who he felt a kinship with. First he met Margaret Chambers in Edina, a farmers daughter who was his equal in education and conversation. 

January 1787, Burns wrote to her, Dear Dr. Countrywoman. I know you will laugh at it, when I tell you that your playing and you together have played the deuce somehow, about my heart. I could sit down and cry like a child……’Personal attractions, Madam, you have much above par, Wit and understanding & worth, you possess in the first class. ‘   

 

Burns spent two more winters in Edina in 1787 and 88, and late in 1788 he met the elegant culture Agnes McLahose, his Nancy who was also well educated and a poet too.  He walked under Clarinda/ Nancy’s window. ‘tis the star that guards. My queen of poetesses empress of the poets soul. I gave her two wineglasses with the toast. ‘Long may we love, and long may we be happy.’ 

Clarinda needed the support of her uncle for her annuity. They wrote over 300 letters correspondence to each other from 1788 to 1791 – when he wrote his great song of parting for her Ae Fond Kiss. Clarinda was to leave and told Burns that he must go back to Jean, that there was not likely any future. Burns heart was broken. 

She left for the West indies.

After his Scotia travels (1786-1788) and his time in Edina having his poems published, Burns returned to Ayrshire and married Jean Armour in April 1788, when they moved to the Ellisland farm. They had three surviving sons. He wrote the poem I Love my Jean for her.  Also in 1791, Elizabeth Burns was born to Anna Park, a barmaid at the Globe Inn in 1791. Jean took her in and looked after her. 

Because of his education Burns straddled all walks of life, from the poor he met in Mauchline to the great and good of the Edina’s literati, the academics and the enlightenment writers.  

*In 1791 he was inspired to write one of the greatest love songs ever written, Red Red Rose.

O my Luve is like a red, red rose

That’s newly sprung in June;

O my Luve is like the melody

That’s sweetly played in tune.

 

So fair art thou, my bonnie lass,

So deep in luve am I;

And I will luve 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;

I will love thee still, my dear,

While the sands o’ life shall run.

 

And fare thee weel, my only luve!

And fare thee weel awhile!

And I will come again, my luve,

Though it were ten thousand mile.

 His stay in the Edina resulted in lifelong friendships - with Lord Glencairn and Francis Dunlop (1730-1815) 

who became a mentor and sponsor and with whom he corresponded. 

*      *      *      *      

Farwell to Clarinda, the mistress of my soul,

The measured time is run

The wretch beneath the dreary pole

So marks his latest sun.

*      *      *      *      *

 

My Peggy’s face, my Peggy’s form,

The frost of hermitage might warm,

My Peggy’s worth, My Peggy’s mind,

Might charm the first of human kind,

I love my Peggy’s angel air,

Her face so truly heavenly fair,

Her nature grace so void of air,

And I do love my Peggy’s heart.   RB

 (Published 1802)

 

A Letter from Mrs Dunlop - She feared I might loose being this ‘rustic bard’ in Edina. She wrote such high praise, and told me, I was the best bard ever to have adorned my country. 

I wrote to her, ‘I have long studied myself and I think I know pretty exactly what ground I occupy, both as a man and a poet….Poets are such outré beings, so much the children of wayward Fancy and capricious Whim, that I believe the word generally allows them a larger latitude in the rules of Propriety, than the sober sons of Judgement and Prudence. ‘ 

 

I Love My Jean

Of a' the airts the wind can blaw,

I dearly like the West;

For there the bony Lassie lives,

The Lassie I lo'e best:

There's wild-woods grow,

and rivers row,

And mony a hill between;

But day and night my fancy's flight

Is ever wi' my Jean.

 

I see her in the dewy flowers,

I see her sweet and fair;

I hear her in the tunefu' birds,

I hear her charm the air:

There's not a bony flower that springs

By fountain, shaw, or green;

There's not a bony bird that sings

But minds me o' my Jean.

RB

 

 

Shortest History of Scotland Murray Pittock

 

Wars of Bruce and William 13thc and 14thc and the sophisticate political thought, 

 

1760 to 1914 – Scotland that caught up  with rest of UK.  Scottish associations and Burns clubs

 

 

From Columba to The Corries, the Picts to Paisley, Doggerland to Devolution – here is the unmissable story of Scotland.

Scotland is one of the oldest nations in Europe. Its territory remains fundamentally unchanged since the fifteenth century, and its southern border with England has barely altered since 1237.

And yet Scotland – a country with its own law, education and church – is not a state at all. In The Shortest History of Scotland, Murray Pittock argues that this very ambiguity has helped make the nation a central part of the global story.

From first tribes to Scotland’s multicultural present, Pittock unpicks the myths from the reality. He explores the glories – real and imagined – of Scottish history, from the Bruce to Balmoral, William Wallace to Walter Scott, Enlightenment to Devolution. And he asks what this rich past can tell us about what may lie ahead.

 

 The International aspects of Scotland has an unusually distinctive brand 15^th or 16^th brand. 

 

“Culture is resistant to change, and history is being manipulated.” 

“Tribalism based on ignorance is not a good idea.” Murray Pittock

Dismantling the Burns Myths

 

(Or attempting to!)  Our Scots bard has been portrayed at times as a reckless, womanising drunk, and his poetry work has not been taken seriously by academics and educators. I believe these false myths are far from the truth and are of serious consideration. Because our national bard continues to this day to have a significant impact on Scots national image and psyche. 

He has written some of Scots most loved poetry and songs and we celebrate Burns night each January 25^th.

 

He has been dismissed as an uneducated farmer. These myths matter, because as our Scots national bard Burns image is one of the most famous image for Scots. It matters on our images of “Scottishness” and of our long history of Scots cultural identity. 

  In fact Burns was voted by Scots as the most iconic Scots image, much like Mozart’s image in Vienna. During Victorian empire times Burns was viewed as part of the empire narrative associated to Walter Scott’s romantic Scottish nostalgia – of a Scotland that was lost and gone forever – and this image focused on Burns love poems, while neglecting his other work.

 

The elites, the academics and literati in Edinburgh found it hard to accept the farmer Burns in his boots, who never attended university: but was self-educated through his local education, his father and his own reading. He met the great and the good here and began his song collecting journeys, after meeting James Jamieson who published the Scot musical museum.    

  

Burns was far more than the peasant farmer or ploughman poet and was highly educated. What is often ignored is that Burns father was a cultured, disciplined and well spoken man himself, who greatly valued education for his family. His mother knew and sang all the old Scots ballads. For a few years Burns attended a school in Ayr, where he was taught by the young teacher John Murdoch, at the age of seven, and he became a great reader. After which he and Gilbert were tutored by Murdoch over the occasional summer months.

 

 Yes he may have occasionally enjoyed social drinking, but as he writes from Ellisland to his friend Robert Cunningham in 1791, after a party when he had sold off the Ellisland farm equipment:  “After the roup was over, about thirty people engaged in a battle and fought it out for three hours. Nor was the scene much better in the house. Not fighting, indeed, but folk lying drunk on the floor and decanting, until both my dogs got so drunk by attending them, that they could not stand. You will easily guess how I enjoyed the scene as I was no further over than you used to see me.”  

Tam O Shanter by Alexander Goudie

Anchors Close Edinburgh

Edina , the New World

Poozie Nansies

Burns & highland Mary

Library books Ellisland

There has been too much negativity written. Why? Was it because Burns didn’t fit into normal accepted norms, and had friends he met at the Globe Inn who were reformers for votes for all men? Because he grew up the son of a tenant farmer?  Because he was a free, independent thinker, who challenged the elites narratives. Or mainly because he wrote in the Scots language and therefore was not to be taken seriously. 

Considering all Burns writing, studying, researching and collecting – his many letters, poems, songs and epistles. His years of toil and hard farm labour growing up, plus his Scotia travels during his short life and all the myths that surround him. I find it hard to believe that Burns was a hard drinker as some myths put out. Because, how did he find time to write some of his best poetry at Ellisland and in Dumfries – plus his Excise work of detailed record keeping, long days travelling on horseback and being a young father. 

Burns poetry and song have become a symbolic touchstone of Scottish identity for generations, The Patriot Bard, by Patrick Scott Hogg

 

In the age of enlightenment Burns believed in the power of reason and common sense. When there was a crackdown on democratic reform. The Jacobite cause was symbolic of the country’s lost, romantic past. The tyrannical oppression of the Pitt government

brought the enlightenment movement to its knees, and silenced the leading minds of a generation. Burns risked his life and freedom to continue composing such radical material of social satire during his last few years. He published anonymously Scots Wa Hae as he considered it too seditious.

Robert Burns Art influences

 

Robert Burns and other poets wrote with Scots Voices. In the 1700s many worked to write down and collect the old Scots songs.  

At a time when mainly Tory unionist voices were being heard - no other writer has done more to keep Scots voices and language alive than Burns. 

I was taken aback at the new Scottish Art galleries Edinburgh on my visit in October 2023, that there was only one mention of Robert Burns – with regard to his “Hunt” poem in an Edinburgh tearoom painting. I felt Burns legacy was a deliberate forgetting. Did his writing influence Scottish art? The main focus in the galleries was on the works of Walter Scott. 

 

Burns was influenced himself when he met many of the major enlightenment figures in Edinburgh in 1786, particularly James Hutton - whose theory was of the whole earth as a living organism. Burns explored the symbolism and spiritualism connections between the natural world, the creative fires and the established church teachings from his father – where dance was frowned upon.  

 

Burns thought of how he might fuse all these new ideas together in his poetry. Later in 1794, he wrote My luv is like a Red Red Rose - ‘ I will love you still my dear till all the seas gang try and the rocks melt with the sun.”  Burns collected and rewrote many of the auld Scots ballads.

 

Burns most famous narrative poem Tam O’ Shanter, was about warlocks, witches, faeries, demons – of the struggles between Old Spunkie’s creative fires and the church teaching - Tam O Shanter. He wrote this poem after a dream, on his walk along the River Nith at Ellisland farm. The Scottish painter Lachlan Goudie and his father were inspired to illustrate a book of the scary ghosts and witches in Tam O’Shanter. 

It was wonderful to see the new Scottish galleries in 2023. 

I realise Scott lived in Edinburgh but Burns was there for quite a few months in 1786 ad 1787. And was greatly influenced by his time there. He visited the men’s social clubs – Fencible Chronicles down Anchor Close. He visited William Creech’s bookshop and publishing house at the Tollbooth near St Giles cathedral and the Mercat Cross, where each day the great and the good met. 

 

He met the great love of his life here, late 1787, Agnes McLahose (or his Clarinda) – who he wrote many letters to, and his great parting song Ae Fond Kiss.

 

**Scott may have been read widely worldwide in the 1800s, but to my mind (and most Scots) Burns is our national hero and bard. He was painted by his good friend Alexander Nasmyth on their walks to Rosslyn. I realise Scott did write memorable books and poems – but his books seems one-sided and narrow of a mythical Scotland that is lost and gone forever. Of a Tory unionist Scotland, that is only part of Scotland.

 

As I walked around the Scottish art galleries – I thought ‘which’ Scotland are we emboldening and remembering here? After the first section covering the romantic period, I entered the brighter more modern period, with the windows open to the east Princes street gardens views and which display some of Scotland’s great impressionist artists – The Glasgow Boys, James Guthrie, John Lavery, William Macgregor: The Scottish Colourists, John Peploe, John Fergusson, Francis Cadell, Leslie Hunter. A memorable display.  

 

Burns was influenced by the Ossian poems of James MacPherson, as the first Scots bard – and also by the other great Scots poets. Burns was writing and collecting Scots poems before Scott, in fact he met a young sixteen year old Walter Scott at an Edinburgh literary party, after which Scott wore about Burns. 

*     *     *     *

 

 

Burns words, images and narratives are all pervasive, whether its his emotive love poems, his love of nature, his voice for all the people with his Socts a Hae and Mans a Man. His poetry has a big impact worldwide on authors in America and on Russian Burns clubs. Steinbeck’s 'Of Mice and Men' and J.D Salinger’s ‘Catcher in the Rye’.

Burns is the most significant Scotch image, heritage, word and song. We should be very proud of his legacies!

Cultural History Disconnects

Cultural History Disconnects

 

I had a big disconnect between my primary school and secondary school. At primary we had Scottish dancing, Scots poetry and song. Then at secondary we had no Scottish history, culture or music at all. Only English literature, history and music. Quite a strange disconnect. We used to go to the military tattoo at the castle every year. 

 

Then I attended college down the cobbled royal mile Edinburgh, and wondered about all the history here – the Canongate Kirkyard, John Knox house, St Giles, Holyrood, the Grassmarket – and the castle. 

 

Going to secondary school Edina, I travelled across the town by bus via princes street. I passed a statue to the Scotch Bard Robert Burns at the bottom of Leith walk each day. On the top deck there were many teenagers in brightly coloured blazers who spoke with posh English accents and I wondered where they came from. In Edina around 25% of children attend private schools. 

 

No it wasn’t and isn’t an integrated melting pot at all but a stiff social hierarchy here. Back in the 60s though, young people had more options to go to study. Houses were built to offer greater social mixing, but that often hasn't succeeded. When people don't feel they have things in common, many put up defensive barriers. 

 

Visiting Holyrood palace I once picked up a small blue book on the Stuart kings of Scotland. I became fascinated by the Scots history and stories. I visited the Scottish national galleries, with their many portraits of Scottish royalty. My parents were from Northern Ireland, so I was very confused, as no doubt they were too. 

Poetry Shapes Us

 

While Burns loved the lassies, his legacy is much deeper and more wide-ranging poetically than his love life. Some of his songs are so familiar, perhaps we can overlook his literary significance – both of his time and of ours.  The musicality of his song writing and poems, is unmatched and many famous poets and songsmiths name Burns as a favourite writer– from Bob Dylan to Wordsworth. 

In his short life he touched hearts, wrote of the worth of man (and woman), respect for the natural world, of freedom fighters, and he was a man o independent mind. 

 

“Poetry hold s mirror to a nations heart and soul. “ Jackie Key

“Its the language of being human” 

 

 *Famous Scots Poems 20^th century 

 

Memo for Spring - Liz Lochead

Drunk man looks at a Thistle – Hugh MacDiarmid

In my Country – Jackie Kay

A Man in Assynt – Norman McCaig

 

Gaelic Song

A rare beauty, or the big sky of Lewis. 

Gaelic poems were songs, tunes and words intertwined. The connections to place.

  

Norman McCaig

“Who owns this landscape – has it anything to do with love? Even the dead are part of it. Land is a character…Landscape is my religion, I feel at home. My substitute for religion and politics.“

 

Drunk man looks at a thistle – Hugh MacDiarmid – Where extremes meet

His poem, revolutionized Scots poetry ’to be yoursell” 

“He showed us that small nations are better than large ones, and the possibility of a new Scotland.” Alan Riach. “A revolutionary vision of what society can be. To rethink the Burns cult for a multi-faceted identity. Language matters.”

 

Has Robert Burns been neglected

 

The British establishment and media have neglected Robert Burns work in schools and elsewhere as worthy of study, and honoured Walter Scott instead. But who today reads Scott? It is Burns that people continue to sing and read all over the world. Burns wrote of equality and brotherhood, before these radical ideas were acceptable and in a way no other writer has quite managed to match. He was influence too by Philosophy writers, the radical Tomas Paine and the reformer Thomas Muir of those tumultuous times late1700s. At his Masonic meetings Burns mixed with all walks of life, from dukes, rich land owners, lawyers and famers.

One of the difficulties with any Burns study is to find the serious real Burns among the memorabilia industry that developed after his death in 1797. As stated by Professor Robert Crawford (The Bard) Burns was never any unionist though and he wrote songs such as – Parcel of Rogues, Liberty Tree, Scots Wa Hae). He did write other poems to try to keep the British establishment off his back and to secure subscribers for his poems. At one point he was scared he was being investigated as a possible radical and reformer. 

The poet Bob Dylan is a huge admirer of Burns, of his economy, tone, the colour of his words, and of the way he brought the old masters into his own composition. Burns was no ignorant farmer as has been portrayed – he read eagerly many of the great English writers, and a favourite was the English poet Alexander Pope. He also read Scottish philosophers such as Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling.. He knew four languages – French, scots, English and Latin. 

 

To live in Radical Times

Rodney Forsyth writes that artists such as Shakespeare and Dylan don’t look back and that they are always moving forwards – yet their paths have sure foundations but they are also deeply immersed in what went before. This is also true of our great bard Robert Burns.

 

In his article entitle ‘Bob and the Bard’, Forsyth writes of how manic creativity was driven in both Bob Dylan and in Shakespeare, ‘by the intuition they lived in decisive historical junctures.’  But he forgets the poet Robert Burns, and his times were even more radical and tumultuous than any other great artist!  

 

I have wondered, as do academics, why the world’s best loved poet and song smith, Robert Burns has been neglected by academic literary research. In his time there was first the American Wars of Revolution (1775 – 1783), when Burns was only 15 and five years later the French Revolution in 1789 – 1799. Goodness the British state and Crown must have been running terrified at this time that revolution would happen here! And they were. They sent preachers out to the churches to preach against the French terror.  In 1797, the year after Burns died, there was the Irish Rebellion and also the Scots Rebels, who were fighting for votes for all men. 

 

Burns was conflicted between the creative fires of Old Spunkie and the more sober influence of his father and the church teachings.

 

Romanticism in Scotland

 

Nigel Leask writes that Burns has been tragically over-looked in academic studies and the need to consider Burns in a de-centralized four nation approach to British culture and of the marginalisation of Burns as a major Romantic poet.

 

The book is entitled 'Scottish Pastoral: Robert Burn and British Romanticism' Leask

sets out to recover a major Romantic poet in a Scottish, British, and colonial context. Burns's fame as Scotland's national bard, and his influence on Scottish writers like Hogg, Scott, Elizabeth Hamilton, Lockhart, Wilson and Carlyle, has achieved local recognition. The goal of this book is to reassess the global significance of Scottish and British Romanticism in the light of Burns's achievement and influence. ' And a more historically contextualised notion of the Scottish Enlightenment. And to situate Burns and 18th century Scottish poetry in relation to Enlightenment theories.

 

But much light remains to be cast on his literary and intellectual context in the Scottish Enlightenment, as well as his far-reaching influence on English and Irish Romantic writers like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, Roscoe, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Clare, Hazlitt, De Quincey Tom Moore and J.C.Mangan. 

 

MUSIC  - Burns is best known as a songwriter and song collector

Burns's poetry is now largely excluded from a revised canon of Romantic literature as it is taught in UK and US English departments, despite the fact that the canon has broadened to include women and minority writers. In fact the decline of his reputation as a major Romantic poet has continued measurably even since 1945. Astonishingly, there is to date no dedicated study of Burns's influence on British Romanticism.

 

Contemporary Burns scholarship is still largely concerned with studying the poet in a national literary framework, despite important recent work by Carol McGuirk, Liam McIllvanney, Robert Crawford and Gerry Carruthers, opening up Burns to broader contexts. 

 

Robert Burns was part of an attempt to produce a canon of Scottish song, which resulted in a cross fertilisation of Scottish and continental classical music, with romantic music becoming dominant in Scotland into the 20^th century. 

Robert Burns (1759–96) and Walter Scott (1771–1832) were highly influenced by the Ossian poems. Burns, an Ayrshire poet and lyricist, is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland and a major influence on the Romantic movement. His poem (and song) "Auld Lang Syne" is often sung at Hogmanay (the last day of the year), and Scots Wha Hae served for a long time as an unofficial national anthem of the country. Burns A Mans a Man as sung by Sheena Wellington at the opening of the Scottish parliament.

 

Novelist Walter Scott popularised Scottish cultural identity 19th century.  He played a major part in defining Scottish and British politics, helping to create a romanticised view of Scotland and the Highlands that changed Scottish national identity. Tom Nairn argues to a false mythical Scotland gone forever. Scott has a highly successful career, with other historical novels - Rob Roy (1817), The Heart of Midlothian (1818) and Ivanhoe (1820) 

 

Burns was greatly influenced by Scots poets Allan Ramsay, James Macpherson, and Robert Fergusson – who wrote poems in scots about Edinburgh. And English poets such as Alexander Pope. Allan Ramsay(1686–1758) laid the foundations of a reawakening of interest in older Scottish literature, as well as leading the trend for pastoral poetry, developed the Habbie stanza as a poetic form. 

 

James Macpherson(1736–96) was the first Scottish poet to gain an international reputation. Claiming to have found poetry written by the ancient bard Ossian, he published translations that were internationally popular, being proclaimed as a Celtic equivalent of the Classical epics. Fingal, written in 1762, was translated into European languages, and its appreciation of natural beauty and treatment of the ancient legend has been credited more than any single work with bringing about the Romantic movement in European, and in German literature (Johann Herder and Johann Goethe). Also popular in France –read by Napoleon^.

 

Other major Scottish literary figures connected with Romanticism include the poets James Hogg (1770–1835), Allan Cunningham (1784–1842) and John Galt (1779–1839). One of the most significant figures of the Romantic movement, Lord Bryon, was brought up in Scotland until he acquired his English title. 

 

**Romanticism in Scotland  II

was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement late 1700s and early 1800s. 

Part of the wider European romantic movement, which was partly a reaction against the Age of Enlightenment, emphasizing individual, national and emotional responses, moving beyond Renaissance and Classical models. In the arts, Romanticism manifested itself in literature with the mythical bard Ossian, the exploration of national poetry in the work of Robert Burns and in the historical novels of Walter Scott. Scott also had a major impact on the development of a national Scottish drama. Art was heavily influenced by Ossian and of the Highlands as the location of a wild and dramatic landscape. 

In music, 

 

In art there was a stress on imagination, landscape and a spiritual correspondence with nature. It has been described by Margaret Drabble as "an unending revolt against classical form, conservative morality, authoritarian government, personal insincerity, and human moderation" Although after union 1707 Scotland increasingly adopted English language and cultural norms, its literature developed a distinct national identity and began to enjoy an international reputation.

 

The editors of the recent essay collection Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism argue, from the 19th century Scottish literature came to stand for an 'inauthentic Romanticism, defined by a mystified commitment to history and folklore', in marginal relationship to an 'organic' English Romanticism. 

 

Scotland was also the location of two of the most important literary magazines of the era, The Edinburgh Review, (1802) and Blackwood Magazine(1817)which significantly influenced the development of British literature and drama in the era of Romanticism. 

 

Romanticism declined in the 1830s, but it continued to affect music and art. It had a lasting impact on the nature of Scottish identity and outside perceptions of Scotland. It is often thought to incorporate an emotional assertion of the self and of individual experience along with a sense of the infinite, transcendental and sublime. 

 

James MacPherson

Robert Burns and Pastoral is a full-scale reassessment of the writings of Robert Burns (1759-1796), arguably the most original poet writing in the British Isles between Pope and Blake, and the creator of the first modern vernacular style in British poetry. Although still celebrated as Scotland's national poet, Burns has long been marginalised in English literary studies worldwide, due to a mistaken view that his poetry is linguistically incomprehensible and of interest to Scottish readers only. 

 

Nigel Leask challenges this view by interpreting Burns's poetry as an innovative and critical engagement with the experience of rural modernity, namely to the revolutionary transformation of Scottish agriculture and society in the decades between 1760 and 1800, thereby resituating it within the mainstream of the Scottish and European enlightenments. Detailed study of the literary, social, and historical contexts of Burns's poetry explodes the myth of the 'Heaven-taught ploughman', revealing his poetic artfulness and critical acumen as a social observer, as well as his significance as a Romantic precursor. Leask discusses Burns's radical decision to write 'Scots pastoral' (rather than English georgic) poetry in the tradition of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson, focusing on themes of Scottish and British identity, agricultural improvement, poetic self-fashioning, language, politics, religion, patronage, poverty, antiquarianism, and the animal world. The book offers fresh interpretations of all Burns's major poems and some of the songs, the first to do so since Thomas Crawford's landmark study of 1960. It concludes with a new assessment of his importance for British Romanticism and to a 'Four Nations' understanding of Scottish literature and culture.