The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Burns (review)

There was a spate of very useful collections of essays on Burns published in the 1990s. Partly this was due to the two-hundredth anniversary of his death in 1996, which occasioned conferences that, in turn, produced published proceedings. But something about Burns also invites the multiplicity of interpretive angles that such volumes make possible, and, conversely, resists the unifying grand thesis that might inspire an academic monograph. In the collections edited by Kenneth Simpson, Burns Now (1994) and Love and Liberty (1996), and Robert Crawford, Robert Burns and Cultural Authority (1997), this quality led to the inclusion of a broad range of commentators, including contemporary poets, novelists and musicians.

Gerry Carruthers's volume for the Edinburgh Companions to Scottish Literature series is equally broad in terms of the number of angles from which Burns is approached, but, floating free from any particular occasion, is more scrupulously academic. The result is a definitive survey of the present state of Burns Studies. Most of the essays here can be grouped under one of two headings. On the one hand there are those that address the ways in which Burns borrowed from or reacted against earlier poets and figured in the literary cultures that came after him. Rhona Brown makes a convincing case for Robert Fergusson as the crucial model for the satires. In 'Burns's Songs and Poetic Craft' Kirsten McCue argues that Allan Ramsay perhaps became a more important precursor when Burns turned to song writing and collecting. Steven McKenna links Burns directly to Virgil's Georgics, while Kenneth Simpson places Burns the narrative artist in relation to the various traditions on which he drew in this respect. Alison Lumsden reveals just how much Burns there is in the Waverley novels, suggesting the extent to which Scott's appropriation of Scottish folk tradition was mediated by the poet's example, not only as an inheritor of that tradition but also as its collector and editor.

Potentially most interesting for readers of The Byron Journal under this heading is Fiona Stafford's essay on responses to Burns among Romantic poets and critics more generally. This essay identifies the publication of Dr James Currie's edition of the Works in 1800, with its revelatory biography of the poet attached, as something of an epoch in the period. Stafford makes the important distinction between the older generation (Coleridge, Wordsworth, Scott) that first encountered the poetry unencumbered by knowledge of Burns's personal life, and later generations that came to the poetry through the biography. But striking here is the extent to which Byron and Shelley responded in the same paradoxical way as Wordsworth: to reject the specifics revealed by literary biography as a distraction from the lasting value of a poet's works, while continuing to insist that this value was, in a more general way, the product of the poet's most intimate self. Of course, Burns himself had, from the beginning of his poetic career, advertised the connection between one aspect of his biography (his status as a labouring tenant farmer) and his poetry, perhaps thereby inviting the curiosity of his readers. Stafford ends with an interesting discussion of Burns's importance for another lower-class writer, Keats. But this essay also invites us to think about the example, and the warning, that the case of Burns might have represented for Byron, in its complication of poetry, public persona and private life.

On the other hand are those essays that place Burns in relation to the politics of his own time, including party politics (Colin Kidd), the politics of race (Nigel Leask) and gender politics (Sarah Dunnigan). The great virtue of these essays lies in the complexity, indeed inconsistency, of the attitudes they reveal. Again and again they defy unqualified assertions about Burns's belief in international brotherhood, or his radicalism, or indeed his misogyny. Kidd's fascinating essay, which emphasises the extent to which party politics...