Reading Robert Burns : texts, context, transformations

277 Pages·2015·1.805 MB·English

by  Burns, Robert, McGuirk, Carol

Poetry and Song in the Age of Revolution
Reading Robert Burns
Carol McGuirk
Number 6
READING ROBERT BURNS:
TEXTS, CONTEXTS, TRANSFORMATIONS
Poetry and Song in the Age of Revolution
Series Editors: Michael Brown
Katherine Campbell
John Kirk
Andrew Noble
Titles in this Series
1 United Islands? Th e Languages of Resistance
John Kirk, Andrew Noble and Michael Brown (eds)
2 Literacy and Orality in Eighteenth-Century Irish Song
Julie Henigan
3 Cultures of Radicalism in Britain and Ireland
John Kirk, Michael Brown and Andrew Noble (eds)
4 Th e Politics of Song in the Age of Revolution
Kate Horgan
5 James Orr, Poet and Irish Radical
Carol Baraniuk
www.pickeringchatto.com/poetryandsong
READING ROBERT BURNS:
TEXTS, CONTEXTS, TRANSFORMATIONS
by
Carol McGuirk
PICKERING & CHATTO
2014
Published by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited
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All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise
without prior permission of the publisher.
© Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Ltd 2014
© Carol McGuirk 2014
To the best of the Publisher’s knowledge every eff ort has been made to contact
relevant copyright holders and to clear any relevant copyright issues. 
Any omissions that come to their attention will be remedied in future editions.
british library cataloguing in publication data
McGuirk, Carol author.
Reading Robert Burns: texts, context, transformations. – (Poetry and song in
the age of revolution)
1. Burns, Robert, 1759–1796 – Criticism, Textual. 2. Burns, Robert, 1759–
1796 – Language. I. Title II. Series
821.6-dc23
ISBN-13: 9781848935198
e: 9781781444986
ePUB: 9781781444993
∞

Th is publication is printed on acid-free paper that conforms to the American
National Standard for the Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials.
Typeset by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited
Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by CPI Books
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vii
List of Figures and Tables ix
Chronology xi
Introduction, with a Brief History of Burns’s Relation to Literary Canons 1
1 Robt. Burness to Poet Burns: Bard, Interrupted 29
2 ‘If Th ou Indeed Derive Th y Light from Heaven’: Wordsworth Responds
to Burns 75
3 Highlands: Burns, Lady Nairne and National Song 109
4 Th ree Drunk Men: Visionary Midnight in Robert Fergusson, Burns and
Hugh MacDiarmid 151
Epilogue: Burns and Aphorism; or Poetry into Proverb 185
Notes 191
Works Cited 233
Index 245

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A 2002–3 Research Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humani-
ties, allowing a year of study and writing, laid the groundwork for this book. I
also thank the Th omas Cooper Library at the University of South Carolina for
a W. Ormiston Roy Fellowship in summer 2004. Professors G. Ross Roy and
Patrick Scott helped me to make optimal use of the Scottish poetry and Burns
collections there. Sabbatical semesters from Florida Atlantic University in 2006
and 2013 enabled completion of several chapters and fi nal revision of the work.
Th e Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters and FAU English Depart-
ment have provided funding for three research visits to Scotland.
Kenneth Dunn, Senior Curator of the Manuscripts and Maps Collection at
the National Library of Scotland, gave crucial help before and during my research
visit in 2012. I was able to examine Burns’s Glenriddell Manuscript and the set-
tlement agreement with Elizabeth Paton (December 1786). NLS staff were
most helpful during an earlier visit as well, assisting me to trace early editions
of the songs of Lady Nairne. Jason Sutcliff e, Museums and Development Man-
ager for the East Ayrshire Council, along with Museums Offi cer Bruce Morgan
and community liaison Linda Fairlie, welcomed me to Kilmarnock, which that
day was undergoing what a Floridian immediately recognized as a small hur-
ricane, however extratropical. Th ey provided a quiet spot for me to look closely
at ‘Scotch Poems’, otherwise called the Kilmarnock Manuscript in scholarly edi-
tions but, as I discovered, not known under that title in Scotland. Finally seeing
it before me was a highlight of my research. Although the buff eting winds hin-
dered travel south to view the Stair MS at the Alloway Robert Burns Birthplace
Museum, I am most grateful to Amy Miller, Curator of the Museum, for her help
in verifying the location and contents of the treasury of manuscripts held there.
To the Mitchell Library in Glasgow I owe thanks for years of research support,
from my early work on my dissertation (whose unoffi cial fi rst director was Joe
Fisher of the Mitchell) to my most recent visit in 2012. I thank Andrew Noble,
John Kirk, Michael Brown and Katherine Campbell, editors of the Pickering &
Chatto series Poetry and Song in the Age of Revolution, for their encourage-
ment, their invaluable feedback and their patience.
– vii –
viii Reading Robert Burns
Patricia Crain has provided perceptive readings of successive draft s, rais-
ing larger questions that greatly helped the revision process. I profi ted greatly
from the discerning advice and encouragement of Julia Prewitt Brown and Ellen
Pollak, who read the work at diff erent diffi cult junctures. Parts of Chapter 3
(‘Highlands’) have been published in a diff erent form in Studies in Scottish Lit-
erature, 35:1 (2007), pp. 184–201 and in a special issue on ballads, guest edited
by Ruth Perry, in Eighteenth Century: Th eory and Interpretation, 47 (2006), pp.
253–88. Th e Epilogue reprints in altered form the opening and closing pages
of ‘Burns and Aphorism’, in Robert Burns and Transatlantic Culture, ed. Sharon
Alker, Leith Davis and Holly Faith Nelson (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2012),
pp. 169–87).
Early Burns editions given to me over the years by my kind brother, Dr Don-
ald L. McGuirk, have allowed me to work productively from my home in South
Florida. My coeditors at the journal Science Fiction Studies (Arthur B. Evans,
Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr, Joan Gordon, Veronica Hollinger, Rob Latham and
Sherryl Vint) have generously shouldered more than their share of the editorial
work during my sporadic mental absences, especially during the fi nal phases of
this project. Finally, I thank all friends, colleagues and family members who have
encouraged this work, among them Paul and Ellen Alkon, Henry and Nancy
Fulton, Dick Hudson, Th omas Keith, Diana Curry McGuirk, Sean McGuirk
and Marsha Gillette, Stuart and Jane McGuirk, Laurie Prencipe, Katherine and
Brian Rittershaus, Lucie Roy, Elizabeth (Lisa) Swanstrom and Scott Svatos,
Sandra Taylor, Helen Vendler, Simon Walton of the Baltimore Robert Burns
Society (NA) and Wenying Xu. I thank the late Kenneth G. Simpson for his
gentle friendship, his scholarship and his organization of the annual University
of Strathclyde Burns conferences as well as his editing of the ensuing conference
volumes. Th e late G. Ross Roy, mentor of so many Burns scholars over the years,
is an important infl uence on this work.
No book is thrown together as quickly as a fritter, as Cervantes observes in
Don Quixote; but this one was unusually protracted in the making, which has
only multiplied my debt to (and gratitude for) the organizations, institutions,
colleagues, family members and steadfast friends who have helped along the way.
LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES
Figure 3.1: Carolina Oliphant (later Lady Nairne) at the time she was
writing many of her songs 129
Figure 3.2: Carolina Oliphant’s sketch of her birthplace, the Old House at
Gask, abandoned for a new family house c. 1800 148
Figure 3.3: Victorian revision of Nairne’s original sketch of the Auld House 149
Table 1.1: Th e First Commonplace Book (April 1783–October 1785).
Sequence of texts and verse-forms; frequent use of common measure 41
Table 1.2: ‘Scotch Poems’: Sequence of texts and verse-forms; emphasis on
standard Habbie and traditional Scottish forms 51
Table 1.3: Poems, Chiefl y in the Scottish Dialect: Burness and Burns 59
Table 2.1: Poems by Wordsworth most strongly linked to Burns 76
– ix –