Robert Burns and the United States of America

Poetry, Print, and Memory 1786–1866

Arun Sood

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319944456
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

This book provides a critical study of the relationship between Robert Burns and the United States of America, c.1786-1866. Though Burns is commonly referred to as Scotland's "National Poet", his works were frequently reprinted in New York and Philadelphia; his verse mimicked by an emerging canon of American poets; and his songs appropriated by both abolitionists and Confederate soldiers during the Civil War era. Adopting a transnational, Atlantic Studies perspective that shifts emphasis from Burns as national poet to transnational icon, this book charts the reception, dissemination and cultural memory of Burns and his works in the United States up to 1866.

Part IBurns Beyond Scotland

© The Author(s) 2018

Arun SoodRobert Burns and the United States of Americahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94445-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Arun Sood¹

(1)

University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK

Arun Sood

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Ae night, at tea, began a plea,

Within America, man:

—Robert Burns, “A Fragment” (3–4). ¹

In 1784, Robert Burns wrote a satirical ballad about the American Revolutionary War. Over nine stomping verses, Burns’s speaker lampooned British military figures, heralded revolutionary heroes and reflected on the political chaos that engulfed Britain in the wake of America’s successful revolt. Such biting satire was timely given the Congress of the Confederation had ratified the Treaty of Paris, officially ending the war, earlier that year on January 14. Indeed, Burns’s “Fragment”, first published in the 1787 “Edinburgh edition” of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, serves as a pertinent reminder of his engagement with contemporary transatlantic affairs and international politics.

For much of the twentieth century, however, Burns was considered a poet of limited linguistic range and geographical significance. His poetry rarely appeared in Romantic anthologies or university English curriculums, resulting in a literary reputation habitually reduced to archaic, sentimental and popular Scottish contexts. Critical approaches have dramatically evolved over the past decade, with the 250th anniversary of the poet’s birth motivating fresh scholarly interest. In 2009, the Scottish Government tied the Burns bicentenary celebrations, along with other key themes of the nation’s perceived culture and heritage, to the widely publicised “Year of Homecoming”; an incentive that encouraged the Scottish diaspora to visit their ancestral origins (Burns continues to be of great economic importance to the tourist sector in Scotland). ² Coinciding with the Scottish government’s campaign was the publication of several critical studies, essay collections and biographies that better established his cross-cultural appeal and international literary significance. ³

This upsurge in critical attention must also be explained in conjunction with wider post-devolutionary shifts in Scottish literary studies. At the opening of the newly devolved Scottish parliament in 1999, singer Sheena Wellington led opposing politicians in rousing chorus as Burns’s “A Man’s a Man for a’ That” echoed across the chambers, marking a symbolic moment in which Burns’s egalitarian anthem helped nurture a sense of collective national virtue that transcended party politics. More concretely, however, the broader implications that devolution had on Scottish Studies have meant that Burns is finally being considered, at the very least in an academic sense, outside of the limiting parameters of strictly Scottish national frameworks.

Christopher Whyte has suggested that Scottish devolution, in inspiring a fresh sense of cultural self-confidence, might “at last allow Scottish literature to be literature first and foremost, rather than the expression of a nationalist movement”. ⁴ A few years later into the new century, Gavin Wallace stated that post-devolutionary Scottish writing had been nourished by the “outward reaching international tap-roots of Scottish culture” and encouraged a departure from considering Scottish texts and writers as functioning to shore up a cohesive national identity. ⁵ In his 2009 critical guide Scottish Literature (notably published in the same year as the 250th anniversary), Gerard Carruthers discussed how the discipline was in a period of “self-reflexive scrutiny”, claiming there had been “too much emphasis upon nationalism” at the expense of “detailed analysis of other important contexts”. ⁶ It was surely inevitable that Burns, who for so long has been popularly labelled Scotland’s “National Bard”, would come under fresh academic interrogation in contexts that moved beyond the Scottish national paradigm.

The conceptual renegotiation of the “nation” and “national literature” in Scotland was also in line with, and partially a consequence of, contemporary movements in the wider fields of literary studies, history, sociology and critical theory. ⁷ In 2008, for example, Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt declared a “transnational moment” in literary studies in which “local and national narratives” could no longer be conceived apart from “our shared human histories” and “global interdependence”. ⁸ Prominent critics of American literature such as Paul Giles and John Carlos Rowe further expanded on literary concepts of “transnationality” by revisiting canonical nineteenth-century American texts and authors that “often appear in quite a different light” when examined through a “transnational matrix”. ⁹ Though the popular tag of “National Bard” might remain, this book—in reflecting on the relationships between Burns and the early USA—further participates in the reconfiguration of the poet as a transnational figure who, both in terms of his poetic output and posthumous legacy, transgressed and continues to transgress geographical, indeed national, boundaries.

Of course, it is vital to acknowledge that Burns’s popularity in the USA did not go entirely unnoticed in the twentieth century. Andrew Hook’s seminal 1975 study Scotland and America explored Burns’s early American reception, and pointed the way to current transnational trends in Burns Studies, as did valuable scholarly insights from Anna M. Painter, Donald Low and James M. Montgomery. ¹⁰ Yet there is little doubt that the 250th anniversary, combined with the cultural effects of Scottish devolution and wider critical trends, has led to much wider attention on Burns’s international significance and literary reputation.

The first spring in reconsidering Burns through a broadly transnational framework grew out of “The Global Burns Network” project, founded in 2007 by Murray Pittock in collaboration with experts spread throughout England, Scotland, Spain, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, the USA and Canada. ¹¹ One of the main incentives of the network was to encourage scholarly publication that increased awareness of Burns’s global significance and historical reception across cultures and beyond the borders of Scotland. Streams of estuary publications and projects soon followed including “Robert Burns: Inventing Tradition and Securing Memory, 1796–1909” (which provided an online catalogue of worldwide Burns monuments); the essay collections Robert Burns in Global Culture (2011), Robert Burns and Transatlantic Culture (2012) and The Reception of Robert Burns in Europe (2014); and the commissioning of the Oxford University Press multivolume edition of Burns’s works. ¹²

Laura Doyle proposes that transnational literary studies should consider how literature exists “within a world of encounters” ¹³ and reveal layered histories, interactions and transcultural exchanges. Adopting this lens, we might draw more attention to the fact that Burns (the man), his poetry and his subsequent cultural “afterlives” participated in an interconnected “world of encounters”, particularly around the Atlantic periphery. While the focus of this book is predominantly on one nation, it also pushes for a stronger recognition of how multiple civic identities (within that nation) impacted upon Burns’s reception and nineteenth-century legacy. The advantage of this perspective is that, in extrapolating the reasons for Burns’s rise to prominence, we might identify several strains of national and civic appropriation, rather than solely attributing a uniform image of him being a “friend” to a singular, egalitarian “American” way of life, as has hitherto been the dominant critical narrative. ¹⁴ The transnational approach in this book is, then, twofold; not only does this study explore Burns’s popularity beyond the nation of Scotland, but it also accounts for the plurality of identities existing across nineteenth-century America that influenced his reception and subsequent afterlives. As we shall see, though Burns might well be considered a “(Trans)National Poet” (suggested in Chapter 8) it remains crucial, when considering his writing, reception and memory, to pay heed to a plurality of nationalisms and identities within transnational contexts.

A transnational approach can admittedly jar with some of the more popular (and palatable) conceptions of Burns as Scotland’s most treasured national icon. It is increasingly known, for example, that Burns intended to sail for Jamaica in 1786 to work on a plantation. Writing to John Moore that same year, Burns lamented his possible fate as a “poor Negro-driver” ¹⁵ ; a chilling phrase that has been dissected by scholars in various attempts to determine the veracity of Burns’s unfulfilled plans. Carol McGuirk has noted the significance of the letter being addressed to Moore, whose novel Zeluco (1786) exposed the “murderous greed” ¹⁶ and cruelty of its planter-protagonist. In writing to Moore—no supporter of slavery—and describing his nightmarish vision of pla...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. Burns Beyond Scotland
• Part II. American Print Culture and Poets
• Part III. Memory and Nation
• Back Matter