Alan Riach discussed the Scottish Renaissance Montrose at EIBF 2026

 

Professor Alan Riach

This event was chaired by Linden Bicket. along with authors Kirsty Gunn and James Robertson: In a lively panel chat. 

They discussed the Scotland of 1926  - A hundred years ago, Scottish literature was crackling with new energy. The authors revisited the Scottish Renaissance through landmark works including Hugh MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, the early work of Neil M Gunn (newly reissued this year), and other under-sung voices including Willa Muir and Helen Cruickshank. 

The authors pursued their deep dive into a remarkable literary moment and the writers who helped reshape Scotland’s imaginative life. 

Alan Riach said that back in the1930s, Montrose was the Paris of the north.

Alan Riach is a Scottish poet and academic. He taught at the University of Waikato in New Zealand from 1986 until 2001. He is currently the Professor of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. Riach was President of the association for Scottish literary Studies from 2006 to 2010 and is a regular contributor to The National. 

Kirsty Gunn

Riach writes, “Irish reunification will come. Scotland’s independence will come. The political system and its media only exist for self perpetuation. 

 

This too is ours to resist. These things will not prevail. The only reliable truths come through the arts and they remain accessible to people, discoverable, no matter how much our enemies have tried to obscure them or deny them their value and place. 

 

What gives us the hope and the drive, the sense of necessary purpose. Music, stories, poems and plays: paintings, sculpture, colour and form, our languages, all that art can do. 

 

How do we move forward. “It come with understanding, then knowledge, and then wisdom. 

In the absence of this, Imagination must be served, or it feeds on itself; then superstitions come creeping in. 

Lost for 200 years, the Raeburn BURNS painting

 

Henry Raeburn’s lost portrait returns to Edinburgh

On 31 March 2025, a previously unknown painting of Robert Burns appeared at Wimbledon Auctions London, described as being in the ‘manner of Sir Henry Raeburn’. Estimated at £300-500, the painting was secured by £68,000 by William Zachs, a Burns scholar and director Blackie House Library and Museum Edinburgh. After a careful restoration at the Simon Gillespie Studio in London, it was brought back to Scotland. 

 

The painting’s attribution to Raeburn has been carefully assessed by several experts: James Holloway, former Director of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery; Dr Duncan Thomson, former Keeper of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery; Helen Smailes, Senior Curator of British Art at the National Galleries of Scotland; Lesley Stevenson, Senior Paintings Conservator at the National Galleries of Scotland; and Dr Bendor Grosvenor, art historian.

 

While the composition corresponds to Nasmyth’s original, this work is more than a simple copy. The painting is significantly larger than Nasmyth’s. Thomson noted ‘that wonderful freshness of observation that marks Raeburn’s work at its best.’ 

Stevenson has studied works by Raeburn in Scottish and American collections: ‘Raeburn’s expressive, seemingly effortless brushwork, the characteristic warm palette, soft, atmospheric lighting and sensitive rendering of the instantly recognisable Robert Burns’. “The subtle interplay of shadows and brilliant highlights resonates with Raeburn’s finest works. The background has changed, as has the format of the picture which is now contained by the rectangular edges of the canvas rather than a feigned oval.” 

 

HISTORY

Cadell & Davies stopped trading in 1840 and their archive was dispersed. Documentary evidence became available over subsequent years. Another letter among their papers contained crucial information:

Edinr 14th Novr 1803 -  Gentlemen

According to your order, transmitted to me by Mr Cunningham, I have finished a copy of Burns the poet, from the original portrait painted by Mr Nasmyth. I have shown it to Mr Cunningham, who thinks it very like him, and I hope it will also meet with your approbation. I am ready to send it whenever you please to order me.

[...] I am, 

Gentlemen, your most obedient servant,

Henry Raeburn

 

Here was the evidence that Raeburn’s portrait of Burns, painted seven years after the poet’s death, was based on the original by Alexander Nasmyth (1758–1840), the definitive image by which Scotland’s ‘heaven-taught ploughman’ is remembered. It was commissioned by the Edinburgh bookseller William Creech to be engraved by John Beugo as the frontispiece for the second published edition of Burns’s poems in 1787. 

 

Burns gave several sittings to Nasmyth and the two became friends. They were of a similar age and shared politically radical leanings. Nasmyth’s portrait spread across the world, through engravings, sculptures, painted copies and countless modes of reproduction from shortbread tins to stamps and even Coca Cola bottles. It has been one of the stars of the national collection ever since it was presented to the National Gallery of Scotland (today’s National) in 1872 By William Nicol Burns.

 

Lawyer Alexander Cunningham (1763─1812), and friend of Burns and patron of Raeburn, secured the commission for Raeburn. During his stay in Edinburgh 1786, Burns formed a friendship with Cunningham. Burns called for him on his deathbed. Cunningham spearheaded a fundraising campaign in support of Burns’s widow. He made the portrait accessible to Raeburn for copying. Another letter, now in the collection of William Zachs, Blackie house library and Museum confirms that the Nasmyth portrait was with Cunningham in Edinburgh in 1803. 

 

The differences William Angus observed between Fry’s engraving and Nasmyth’s portrait are here resolved. -   Raeburn looking at Nasmyth looking at Burns

 

Sir Henry Raeburn, Robert Burns (1759–1796), after Alexander Nasmyth, 1803, Collection of William Zachs, Blackie House Library and Museum, Edinburgh

II  What does Henry Raeburn’s painting tell us about Robert Burns?  Professor Alan Riach  The rediscovered now famous painting by Henry Raeburn was unveiled at the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Alloway The painting was lost for 200 years and has been on public display since January the National Galleries Edinburgh.

It was found in a house clearance in Surrey, England, and auctioned in Wimbledon in March 2025, starting price of £300-£500. The winning bid was £68,000. Its purchase was a triumph. Dr William Zachs, director of Blackie House Library and Museum in Edinburgh and long-term Burns scholar and enthusiast, was aware of its potential provenance, realising that it might just possibly be the portrait he had heard about which had been missing for centuries. Experts later confirmed that it is the lost Raeburn portrait.

 

It was commissioned 1803 for 20 guineas by the publishers Cadell & Davies, and was based on the portrait by Alexander Nasmyth, the most famous image of Burns. Burns himself sat for Nasmyth’s portrait. So Raeburn’s work was not from life, and yet the life that breathes out of the painting is immediately palpable. The light comes out of the paint.

 It was intended that Raeburn’s portrait should be the source of an engraving which could then be used as an illustration in future editions of Burns’s works, so it was sent from Edinburgh to London but thereafter dropped from sight. Lovers and scholars of both Burns and Raeburn had been scratching their heads across generations, worrying about where it could have gone)

 Bill Zachs’s munificence and his enlightened purpose is at the heart of the painting’s new history. It’s currently at the museum in Alloway thanks to the National Trust for Scotland. The intention is to take it on tour, to make it available to be seen across Scotland and internationally.

 

Perhaps there are only two ways to support the health of a nation’s culture – one is the provision of government. For that, you need enlightened politicians who really know the value of the arts.

Such people are thin on the ground in Scotland but this is the established way of most European countries, so here’s an example, loud and clear, of the value of the NTS.

 

III    ALAN RIACH

“I wasn’t quite ready for the power of its presence. Raeburn’s portrait of Burns has its own story of rediscovery and recovery for Scotland, but what does the painting itself say to us now, for its human immediacy? What makes it a great painting, what does it tell us about Burns that we don’t already know? 

 

The other is the work of enlightened, insightful and socially minded benefactors. Dr Duncan Thomson, former keeper of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and curator of the last major Raeburn exhibition at the National Galleries, in 1997: “It is more than likely that Raeburn had seen Burns in his heyday in Edinburgh … and had observed that glowing eye that had so impressed the young Walter Scott. The result is a portrait that speaks in an entirely new way of the warmth, the sensuality and the profound intelligence that we find in Burns’s poetry.”

 

Alan Riach writes - “What does the painting capture and show us, that makes it so special? Why do we call Raeburn a great artist, and not so much Nasmyth? Give Nasmyth his due. His paintings are fine work and invaluable in their own ways. His documentation of the poet’s face and features and the landscape beyond him are vital records and meaningful evocations. But when I stand and look at the Raeburn, something else is happening.

 

It's ultimately about the potential of life itself, human vulnerability, the power living gives us, what it is to be alive, and what is lost when that gift is broken, squandered, or cut short. This is an understanding great art provides, and great tragic art, above all. It’s all about how we find value. Raeburn’s portrait of Burns is tragic in a way that Nasmyth’s is not. It is profoundly alive, speaking of an individual’s life and that person’s landscape, history and primal capacity for life, which our knowledge of Burns’s biography informs us was so badly curtailed.

 

In that regard, Burns is in good company. His fellow writers Robert Louis Stevenson dead at 44; Robert Fergusson dead at 24; or Lewis Grassic Gibbon, James Leslie Mitchell, dead at 33. Lives of lost potential, each of them. When I look at Raeburn’s Burns, something of the sorrow of that is present. And then, thinking of what might have led to his death, what dark currents start to swirl? Conspiracies of the establishment to cloud and collude against a political threat, a man whose work exemplified independent thinking?

 

 

Writing after the death of Leslie Mitchell to his widow Rhea from his home in Shetland on April 14, 1935, Hugh MacDiarmid said: “It is impossible in circumstances like yours to say or do anything that does not seem horribly helpless and irrelevant.

“I agree with all you say about the wanton cruelty and utter senselessness of such a bereavement – and personally I can accept that; it squares with my irrationalist philosophy of life – but what I do find absolutely appalling and unendurable is not that ultimate meaninglessness from any human standpoint, but the fact that within our human scheme of things it should be added to by readily preventable ills which are in so many ways still more immediately torturing and terrible. However brutally and unintelligibly the blind forces of nature cut across all that seems decent and reasonable, there is no earthly reason why to such unspeakable outrages on human sensibility should be added economic jeopardies and humiliation, and obligations of drudgery and anxiety superimposed on an irreparable loss.

 

“The latter – the thrust-back of the helpless victims into toil and need, and the intolerable savaging and neutralising of the best human hopes and efforts – is perfectly avoidable.

“In other words, I can face up to the unhuman cosmic course of things and have no religious belief of any sort or any consolation derived from a philosophy that relies on an ultimate good in any human sense of the term; but every fibre of my being protests to the uttermost against the needless degradations and difficulties that arise from a remediable economic system.”

How these words might apply to the writers I’ve named and to many others closer to our time, I need not elaborate, but simply indicate the hard truths that lie behind them, and the courage it takes to face up to them.

 

 

 

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.

Blackberries ~ Margaret Atwood

Blackberries

~ Margaret Atwood

 

 

In the early morning an old woman

is picking blackberries in the shade.

It will be too hot later

but right now there's dew.

 

Some berries fall: those are for squirrels.

Some are unripe, reserved for bears.

Some go into the metal bowl.

Those are for you, so you may taste them

just for a moment.

That's good times: one little sweetness

after another, then quickly gone.

 

Once, this old woman

I'm conjuring up for you

would have been my grandmother.

Today it's me.

 

Years from now it might be you,

if you're quite lucky.

The hands reaching in

among the leaves and spines

were once my mother's.

I've passed them on.

 

Decades ahead, you'll study your own

temporary hands, and you'll remember.

Don't cry, this is what happens.

Look! The steel bowl

is almost full. Enough for all of us.

 

The blackberries gleam like glass,

like the glass ornaments

we hang on trees in December

to remind ourselves to be grateful for snow.

 

Some berries occur in sun,

but they are smaller.

It's as I always told you:

the best ones grow in shadow.

 

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!

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.