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 where 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 and an Edinburgh tearoom painting. I felt Burns legacy was a deliberate forgetting. Did his writing influence Scottish art? The main focus here 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 connection 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 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 creative fires and 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 Alexander Goudie and his father were inspired to illustrate a book of the scary ghosts and witches of 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 each day. 

 

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 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. Scott wrote 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 a 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. An 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 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 - from his Scots Wa  Hae and A Mans a Man. His poetry has a big impact worldwide on authors in America and on Russian Burns clubs.

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

 

Revival Scots Language

 

I attended a talk last week by the Scots poet Len Pennie at Dreamworks Bookshop Milngavie

Pennie’s poems have more lilting lyrical musicality than her English poetry. Her poems pack immediate emotional directness and punch. She says it was all the grandmothers who kept the Scots voices and language alive. 

 

Welsh Labour are proud of Welsh Gaelic and the Welsh flag. We cannot say the same of Scottish labour, would they stand in front of the saltire and speak in Scots Gaelic or Scots? There’s been a long story of religious divisions in Scotland – the divide and rule tactic of the empire elites.

 

She suffered dreadful trolling online abuse. For many years the Scots language has been treated as a ‘pretendy language’ and oddly often by hostile Scots, it’s a centuries old saga. Yet Scots have been historically influenced by their connections and trade to Flanders and Ireland. 

II  Back when James VI held a clan gathering on Iona, he insisted that the clans had their eldest son educated in England, and taught to speak ‘correct English’. This practice continues to this day, with the private school accents. All the assimilation, repression of cultural difference. In the 20^thcentury English managers and middle class professionals came to Scotland – and Scots speaking workers were treated as second class citizens in their own country. 

 

The opposite was true back after union 1700s though – the Scots were the workers of the British empire, when after Reformation many Scots were highly educated and there were more ancient universities in Scotland – 

 

So what changed?

During the 1700s several poets wrote to keep the scots language alive  - Allan Ramsey, Robert Fergusson and notably Robert Burns. Burns wrote in English, the language of his education in books. But it was when he read the Scots poems of Fergusson he was inspired to write in Scots, the language closest to his heart. His mother knew and sang all the old Scots ballads. Burns collected, added to and edited the auld Scots songs from his many Scotia travels. 

 

English is of course the global language after the spread of the British empire. But crucially cultural diversity matters so much – both back in Burns day and today. We can have global trade and connectedness AND also have our own voices. We can have both. Why must it be either or?

 

For decades Scots children were rapped over the knuckles if they spoke with a Scots accent or belted if they used Scots words or dialects. Broadcaster Lorraine Kelly was initially told she must tone down her Scots accent if she wanted to be successful - and she thought why should I? 

 

In the 1950s most radio and tv presenters spoke with a clipped Oxford English. Today we have many accents – yet worryingly Scots students attending Edinburgh university continue to be mocked for speaking with a Scots accent – and told to ‘speak more correctly’ by English private school students. When I travelled across Edinburgh on the top of the bus I heard English accents of students in brightly coloured blazers and thought, where are they from? Around 25% of Edinburgh students attend private schools. This creates an unhealthy two-tier society which holds many children back.  

 

At Celtic Connections there are many hauntingly beautiful Gaelic singers 

When Scots writer Billy Kay gave a speech in Scot in the Scottish parliament, he was ridiculed by many Scots. The usual Scots versus Scots. In Switzerland they can speak both local and high German languages – the two languages sit by side by side and not in opposition to each other.

 

Why must Scots chose a side? Religious wars are now centuries old – while the British Constitution of 1688 continues to dominate. Why cant we have English and Scots and Scots Gaelic alongside each other?

 

The Scots language is not merely a side issue – its crucial to our Scots identity and unique voice. Diversity matters. 

 

**The Scots language has been recognised on Spotify – Iona Fyfe

 

Scots is now taught in Scottish schools. 

Lindsey Hilsum Poetry in Times of War EIBF 2025

It’s the Poetry we’ll remember

Channel four foreign news correspondent gave a talk at Edinburgh international book festival 2025, on her book I Brought the War with me, about her poetry in times of war. She always carries a book of poetry with her. After her horrific experiences of fighting in Rwanda, she felt she needed philosophical more than psychological help.

 

She says that people remember the great poets of the world wars, and not the journalists reports. 

When in Ukraine in 2022, at a town called Izium, she stood beside an apartment block split apart by a missile. Fifty four people had been killed in the Russian attack six months before. 

 

"Purple and yellow wild flowers were growing in the rubble that filled the chasm between the two parts of the block. It is not the houses. It is the space between the houses,” I thought. “It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist.” 

She then thought of James Fenton 1981 poem A German Requiem, about selective memory in the second world war. 

 It is not your memories which haunt you.
It is not what you have written down.
It is what you have forgotten, what you must forget.
What you must go on forgetting all your life.

“The idea that the spaces between the houses symbolised gaps in memory, and that forgetting might be essential if people were to live together in peace, 

Poetry helps us see parallels with the past, and puts up a mirror to our fears.

 

Hilsum spoke of her often traumatic experiences covering many foreign wars over her 40 years of experience…” Many journalists are resilient, and – at least for now – I would count myself as fortunate in this regard. Witnessing the suffering of others, surviving danger and experiencing grief are all profound experiences, to which nightmares, anger, tears and bouts of despondency are all normal, human responses. They are not necessarily signs of a clinical condition.”

She explained that Poets don’t have the answers. But they may help us understand our own actions and reactions and find a way through the darkness.  

She got into reporting via aid work in Central America in the 70s. ‘I didn’t really know that war was brewing across the region – my concern was social justice, and, at 20 years old, I just wanted to have an adventure and change the world. (I succeeded in the former but not – needless to say – in the latter.) In 1982, I moved to Kenya to work for the UN International Children’s Emergency Fund, Unicef.

She realised her main skill was to pivot to journalism. “Reality overcame the illusions I harboured. Nearly every country neighbouring Kenya – Uganda, Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia – was going through civil war… I found that while reporting on people in war zones was at times upsetting and occasionally terrifying, it was also rewarding and exciting. I felt that I was living through history as it happened. Later, I was lucky enough to get a job with Channel 4 News, based in London, and while I have never been exclusively a war correspondent, I have spent a lot of my career reporting conflict”

She spoke of the great war poets, and said that many war poems are written by women. “I am drawn to what Wilfred Owen described as: “The pity of war, the pity war distilled.” 

Hilsum, was handed a rose in Velyka Novosilka, eastern Ukraine, by Oleksiy, who was cycling across town to see his friend, at the start of the Ukrainian counter-offensive in June 2023.” 

“ journalism is ephemeral. We rarely read the stories written by reporters who covered the first and second world wars. We do, of course, read the poetry. They focus on what is critical now – this village taken, that truce broken, a new atrocity by occupying forces. But poets through the ages have turned the horror of war into transcendent works of beauty and meaning.

The late Irish musician Frank Harte said: “Those in power write the history; those who suffer write the songs.”

 This is an extract from I Brought the War with Me by Lindsey Hilsum, which is published by Chatto & Windus on 19 September (£16.99). 

II  Extract from her memoir, she explains why her own words were not always enough    

My TV news report reflected some of this, but it did not have the allusive power of the poem.

“In my nearly four decades as a foreign correspondent, I have always carried a book of poetry with me. While the images we show have great impact, I feel that journalistic language sometimes fails to convey the intensity of the experience. Maybe Fenton’s poetry resonates with me because he was a war correspondent as well as a poet – he sees what I see but has found a more compelling way of expressing it, as if he is working in three dimensions while I am stuck in two. We journalists pride ourselves on the clarity of our prose and on making complex stories simple. That’s our job – to explain why terrible things are happening and to challenge the euphemisms used by politicians and military spokespeople. We also try to convey the thoughts and feelings of the people we meet, and a sense of what it feels like to be on the ground. Yet we may lose the deeper meaning, the universal import of what we have witnessed or the contradictory emotions that war engenders.”

She got into reporting via aid work in Central America in the 70s. "I didn’t really know that war was brewing across the region – my concern was social justice, and, at 20 years old, I just wanted to have an adventure and change the world. (I succeeded in the former but not – needless to say – in the latter.) In 1982, I moved to Kenya to work for the UN International Children’s Emergency Fund, Unicef."

”She realised her main skill was to pivot to journalism. “Reality overcame the illusions I harboured. Nearly every country neighbouring Kenya – Uganda, Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia – was going through civil war… I found that while reporting on people in war zones was at times upsetting and occasionally terrifying, it was also rewarding and exciting. I felt that I was living through history as it happened. Later, I was lucky enough to get a job with Channel 4 News, based in London, and while I have never been exclusively a war correspondent, I have spent a lot of my career reporting conflict”

War gives your life purpose and meaning… the colours are brighter and the mountains clearer

She spoke of her personal reporting of war zones – “The lives of those who have had war visited upon them, the children, conscripts and civilians, are desperate and miserable. But those who visit war – aid workers, journalists, military volunteers – share a secret. War gives your life purpose and meaning."

 Suddenly you believe you know what matters and what can be dismissed as unimportant. The colours are brighter and the mountains clearer. You live in the moment.” 

This is an extract from I Brought the War with Me by Lindsey Hilsum, which is published by Chatto & Windus on 19 September (£16.99). 

 

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.”

 

Was Robert Burns a Reformer, a Jacobin or a Supporter of King George

 

There has been a debates over Burns political views. Its particularly difficult because Burns had to play all sides in order to earn a living and to gain subscribers for his poetry. Burns grew up the oldest of seven children with a poor tenant farmer, who was told his land would be improved, but wasn’t. In July 1786 Buns published his first book of poetry, Poems Chiefly in the Scotch dialect” and to do so required many subscribers. 

 

Burns was an active freemason which was a great way to network, gain influence and meet men from all walks of life. He also belonged to gentlemen clubs in Edinburgh. For instance during his time in the crossroads town of Mauchline (1784-1786) he met all kinds of people from all walks of life at Poozie Nansies ale house -  titled landowning men, dukes, earls, lawyers, academics, clergy, farmers, peasants, shopkeepers, artists, doctors, scholars. 

 

His first book of poems received great acclaim and sold worldwide. He was given enough support to enable him to travel to Edinburgh for a second edition and later to travel across Scotland collecting both subscribers and traditional tunes and songs. As a man of genius he might have been better supported and after two years (1786-1788) he felt compelled to join the Excise to support his young family. He married Jean Armour in April 1788 and they moved to Ellisland farm north of Dumfries. He continued to write his poetry, collect songs, travel long distances for the Excise and keep detailed records. Jean looked after the farm. 

 

The Burns museum displays many of the myths that surround Burns – from one of the first Romantic poets, to the farmers son in enlightened Edinburgh. His image was appropriated in Victorian times to promote Scotland worldwide. Often Burns significant and interesting political views and the turbulent revolutionary times he lived in are glossed over. At the times 1780s there was the American wars of independence and the French revolution.

 

But this was not how Burns viewed his poetry and songs. He wrote in Scots and English, after reading Robert Fergusson Scots poems and Allan Ramsey. He collected and wrote to save and preserve the Scots language and songs. At a time when Scots voices were being crushed after Culloden (1746), when the highland way of life was destroyed by Cumberland and wearing the kilt was banned. 

 

Burns wore a plaid shawl around his shoulders and his hair in a pony tail as a sign of rebellion. His grandfather had worked for the Earl of Marischal south of Aberdeen - the most powerful Jacobite who fled after the 1715 uprising. His father then travelled south.

 

In Dumfries Burns drank with reformers at the Globe Inn. In fact there’s a story of Burns rudely keeping his hat on during the singing of the British national anthem at the new Dumfries theatre. He wrote to Mrs Dunlop about the “idiot French King Louis, who deserved to have his head chopped off”. His reformer friends at Dumfries Globe Inn, sent weapons to France to help the new republic. Tom Paine wrote the Rights of Man’ pamphlet which helped start the American wars of independence. Burns wrote his famous poem A Mans a Man For A That 1795 – “shall equals be for all that”

Burns certainly was a man of many sides – a Lad O Pairts, He adored lively debates, had renowned conversations, and looked widely for ideas. His favourite book A Man of Feeling by Henry McKenzie. He read all the great English poets and enlightenment figures. He lived in crossroads, turbulent times – just as Mozart (1756-1791) and Bob Dylan. Any study of Burns needs to dig deep into the many images and myths portrayed of Burns.  

 

In his book “Robert Burns and Political Culture” Dr Paul Malgrati advocates that Burns was politically ambiguous - he was so to protect himself and his family, from being investigated by the Hanoverian London authorities. He was nearly investigated but managed to contact supporters to protect him. At the time reformers such as the lawyer Thomas Muir were being put on trial and then sent to Australia. Malgrati suggests that our great Scottish bard is not the right role model or image for Scotland’s independence. (Sunday National, 22 Dec 2024. Book suggests independence movement should cut ties with Robert Burns).  

 

Reformers for liberty in turbulent times! - “I was the independent-minded man whose sympathies were with my own folk – even while I had to work for the crown and government. Democracy’ was a dangerous word. Reform! My god! What a reform I would make among the sons and even the daughters of men!”  RB

My impression of Burns is he had great humanity and understanding. Burns was a man of independent mind. His many letters show a man interested in politics and also a great reader. Reading his letters, poems, songs and biographies’ its hard not to believe Burns supported reform. 

He lived in turbulent times of reform. Burns wrote his famous ‘Scots wa Hae’ about all freedom fighters – from Wallace, Bruce to Thomas Muir. Burns questioned, he looked for truth, he studied enlightened thought. He’s Scotland’s best known and loved poet. In my view Burns views on egalite, freedom of thought, respect for nature, his wish to preserve Scots voices – make Burns exactly the role model for Scotland’s independent future.

A NEW “Robert Burns and Political Culture” book raises the question of whether Burns is the best cultural icon for the Yes movement. Book suggests independence movement should cut ties with Robert Burns - 

Sunday National 22 Dec 2024 - 

https://www.thenational.scot/news/24812289.book-suggests-independence-movement-cut-ties-robert-burns/

Romanticism in Scotland

 

Nigel Leask rites 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.

 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (EBB)

 “After the first Anglo-Sikh war in India, one of these days our great Indian empire, will stand up on its own legs and make use of our own rope to scourge us. … what right has England to an Indian empire?

No more than the Duke of Sutherland to his broad estate, wait  a little, we shall see it all arranged, according to a better justice, on the small scale and the large”  

 

Her family made its money on the sugar planation of Jamaica

 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning     (1806 –  1861) 

was an English poet of the Victorian era popular in Britain and the United States during her lifetime. Born in Count Durham, the eldest of 11 children, Elizabeth Barrett wrote poetry from the age of eleven.  At 15 she became ill, suffering intense head and spinal pain for the rest of her life. 

In the 1840s Elizabeth was introduced to literary society through her cousin, John Kenyon. Her first adult collection of poems was published in 1838 and she wrote prolifically between 1841 and 1844, producing poetry, translation and prose. She campaigned for the abolition of slavery and her work helped influence reform in the child labour legislation. Her prolific output made her a rival to Tennyson as a candidate for poet laureate on the death of Wordsworth. 

She was married to Robert Browning. Elizabeth's work had a major influence on prominent writers of the day, including the American poets Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson. She is remembered for such poems as “How Do I Love Thee” (Sonnet 43, 1845) and "Aurora Leigh" (1858). 

Scots Makar Jackie Kay

 

Excellent chat with Jackie Kay with Janice Forsyth about her 5 years as the Scots Makar on BBC Scotland’s afternoon show -  https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/jackiekay

POEMS

Poem for new babies - Lullaby welcome wee one

Poem for the Queensbury crossing - The long view

Poem for the Homeless, 

Scottish Parliament 2020 – Farewell for Hogmanay

plus the baton from poem to song.

  

Jackie chose singers – Celeste Lean on Me, Nina Simone, Peggy Seeger, 

 

BOOK - Elif Shakaf, How to Stay Sane in a world of Divisions 

 

“Its been a joyous , interesting ride to have been to every major city and to have been to so much of the highlands an disbands, rural part of Scotland. And incredible journey..

 

Nicola Sturgeon, “Jackie Kay made an enduring and positive impact –and has widened the  appeal of poetry.”