Revising Robert Burns and Ulster: Literature, Religion and Politics, c. 1770-1920 (review)

This volume, published to coincide with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Robert Burns's birth, contributes to the exploration of one aspect of what the historian Roy Foster called "varieties of Irishness" in his Cultural Traditions in Northern Ireland (1989). It focuses on the literary and cultural interaction between writers in Scotland and the north of Ireland, particularly those of Protestant stock, in which Burns occupies a place of signal importance because his poetry enjoyed unique popularity in Ulster in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is therefore "used as a symbol of the larger relationship in the north of Ireland to Scottishness and Scottish culture before, during and after his lifetime," and the aim of the contributors is to re-evaluate "how Burns was imagined" by northern Irish writers, and "to explore the more general inflection of Scottish themes in an Ulster context and the permeation of Scottish culture into Ireland" (11).

The principal Irish writers upon whom Burns's influence has customarily been regarded as greatest include the rhyming weaver poets of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such as James Campbell and James Orr, and the schoolmaster Samuel Thomson, whose work initially received critical attention in John Hewitt's Rhyming Weavers and Other Country Poets of Antrim and Down (1974). In probing the nature of this influence, John Erskine recalls the long history of cultural and intellectual links that already existed between Scotland and Ulster before the time of Burns: generations of candidates for the Presbyterian ministry were trained in the University of Glasgow; the works of Scottish writers were often published in Ulster; and Scotland gave points of reference to a Hiberno-Scots community in Ulster which did not easily align itself culturally, religiously, or politically with either Dublin or London. Burns achieved particular popularity because many of his Ulster readers identified with his rural background, his social origins, and his use of a recognisable vernacular language. It is, however, both an error and an oversimplification, Erskine argues, to regard the Ulster vernacular poets who published after Burns as mere imitators or bardolaters. Aligning himself with critics such as Linde Lunney and Liam McIlvanney, he proposes that Burns was important to the Ulster poets as a fellow writer and as an inspirational example of the potential of vernacular rural verse.

Oversimplification has also characterised the view commonly taken of Presbyterian culture and its relevance to the principal rhyming weaver poets; Andrew Holmes provides a welcome corrective to this in his discussion of "Presbyterian Religion, Poetry and Politics in Ulster, c. 1770-1850." While acknowledging the contribution of Hewitt, Ivan Herbison, and others in restoring Ulster vernacular poetry to the cultural history of the period, he questions the extent to which their emphasis on the influence of religion as "a means of reaffirming community, providing a source and discourse for political ideas, or alleviating stress in a changing society" underestimates "the sincere piety of the politically uninterested or the conservative theology and politics of others" (45, 46).

Holmes develops two important lines of enquiry in support of his point. First, he demonstrates that vernacular poetry was not the exclusive preserve of writers who favoured New Light theology and political radicalism, such as Orr and Campbell, but was also written by conservatives in religion and politics, such as Francis Boyle. Likewise, in the political sphere, he locates the ideals of James Hope, one of the leaders of the '98, in his father's "ultra-orthodox Covenanter" faith and his exposure to "the influence of conservative Reformed theology" as well as "the priorities of the Enlightenment" (49). Such differing responses both reflect the divisions within contemporary Presbyterianism itself and point to "a complex religious culture in which religious principle and political outlook could be combined in a variety of ways" (54). By extension, they also show the value of a more sophisticated...