导论
Introduction

By Kirstie Blair
克斯蒂·布莱尔

Kirstie Blair was educated at the University of Cambridge and then spent a year on a Kennedy Scholarship at Harvard, prior to studying for her PhD at the University of Oxford. She worked as a lecturer at the University of Glasgow from 2005-2012 before moving to Stirling as a professor of English Literature. She is a noted expert in the field of nineteenth-century poetry, and has published two monographs with Oxford University Press, Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart (2006), and Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion (2012) and numerous articles and book chapters in the field. She is currently researching Scottish working-class poetry in the nineteenth century and holds a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to complete a book-length study, Working Verse in Victorian Scotland.

克斯蒂·布莱尔曾就读于剑桥大学，后取得肯尼迪奖学金在哈佛大学深造一年，继而在牛津大学攻读博士学位。2005年至2012年间，布莱尔在格拉斯哥大学任教，后到斯特灵大学做英语文学教授。布莱尔教授是研究19世纪诗歌的著名专家，在牛津大学出版社出版了两部专著：《维多利亚诗歌和心灵的文化》（2006）和《维多利亚诗歌与宗教的形式和信念》（2012），发表了多篇论文并为多部书籍撰写部分章节。布莱尔教授目前正在研究19世纪苏格兰工人阶级诗歌，主持的利华休姆研究基金将助其完成长篇研究报告《维多利亚时期苏格兰工人阶级诗歌》。

Robert Burns is arguably the world's best-loved poet and songwriter. With statues of the poet in cities and towns throughout Britain, in the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and an annual international celebration of Burns' Night on his birthday, 25 January, his influence reaches far beyond his native Scotland. While it reached its zenith in the nineteenth century, as Burns' Clubs and other societies for Scottish expatriates spread, via emigration and settlement, throughout the British colonies and beyond, it still survives today. Most English-speakers may only know a verse or two of “Auld Lang Syne”, traditionally sung at midnight on New Year's Eve, and perhaps some of his second most famous song, “A Red, Red Rose”, but they still know Robert Burns' name and reputation. In Scotland itself, Burns is a vital part of the representation of Scottishness to the rest of the world. His birthplace and several other locations associated with his life and works are preserved as visitor centres and museums. His image adorns mugs, T-shirts, shortbread tins, and all the paraphernalia associated with “tartanry”, or a clichéd version of Scottishness. Yet his work also continues to be read, to be taught to schoolchildren and students, to attract academic study, and to influence contemporary poets, novelists, singers and songwriters. Indeed, in the twenty-first century, and in particular in relation to recent debates about Scottish independence and the September 2014 independence referendum, Robert Burns' place in Scotland and the wider world is very much a live and sometimes controversial issue.

Burns was born in 1759 in Alloway in Ayrshire, a coastal region in south-west Scotland, the eldest child of William Burns, gardener and tenant farmer, and his wife Agnes Broun; he died 37 years later in Dumfries, in the neighbouring region of Dumfries and Galloway. Other than short periods of travelling and visiting the city, his life was spent in what by our standards is a small geographical area, and he never left the borders of Scotland. He was emphatically and in his own estimation a local poet, writing in his commonplace book in August 1785 that despite the many attractions of Ayrshire:

We have never had one Scotch Poet of any eminence, to make the fertile banks of Irvine, the romantic woodlands and sequestered scenes on Aire. And the heathy, mountainous source and winding sweep of Doon, emulate Tay, Forth, Ettrick, and Tweed. This is a complaint I would gladly remedy, but, Alas! I am far unequal to the task, both in native genius and education.

Here we see Burns imagining what he was about to achieve, in his book of poems published a year later: putting Ayrshire definitively on the map as a subject for literature. When he wrote that he felt himself “unequal” to the task, this is in part false modesty. By this date his poetry was highly esteemed in local circles and he knew his own worth. He was, however, legitimately concerned about his lack of education compared to the poets he admired, such as the highly educated Londoner Alexander Pope, or the Scottish poet and his near-contemporary Robert Fergusson, who died in poverty but had been educated at the prestigious University of St Andrew. Burns' formal schooling, in contrast, had been extremely limited. As the eldest son of a tenant farmer, on farms that were scarcely profitable, he was helping out with hard manual labour in the field and on the farm from the age of 10. Throughout his life, even when literary success gave him other options, Burns worked extremely hard, was always short of money, and struggled to support his family. He understood the difficulty of combining poetry and labour in a way that few previous poets had.

The influential vision of Burns as a “Heaven-taught ploughman”, however, in the famous words of an early review, is more complicated than it might seem. In the late eighteenth century, ideas of “natural” genius and divinely inspired poetry were very fashionable, as what we now call the emergence of Romantic movement in English literature. Burns recognized that the “peasant poet” was a marketable category. By presenting himself as the untaught, rustic farmer, using homely Scots in his poetry and wearing his farmer's boots to exclusive Edinburgh gatherings, he ensured that he and his works seemed exotic and exciting to the higher-class literary readers whose patronage was necessary for success. In fact, Burns' class position was more ambiguous than it might seem. As a tenant farmer, like his father before him, he was not a landowner, but he was an employer of servants rather than a servant himself. He worked the land alongside men and boys whose wages he paid. And although his days were generally filled with hard work, he managed to find the leisure time for a considerable amount of reading and self-education. William Burns had actively promoted the education of his sons, in hiring a tutor, John Murdoch, who stayed in touch with the young Burns and helped to shape his literary tastes, in buying books—expensive luxury goods in this period—to school his sons himself, and in sending them for further instruction whenever they could be spared from farm work. By the time Burns was a teenager he had read erratically but widely and memorized substantial parts of his favourite authors, could write very well in standard English, knew enough French to read French literature, and had learnt practical skills such as surveying and mathematics. A poem such as “Elegy on the Death of Robert Ruisseaux”, for instance, indicates his literary sophistication. “Ruisseaux” is a double pun on his surname: it can be translated as “streams” (a “burn” in Scots is a small stream), but is also a reference to the French writer and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, especially famous in this period for his theories about “natural” education. Burns can assume that the small circle of readers for this unpublished poem will understand and appreciate such references.

The young Burns, then, was a literary-minded and highly intelligent young man who enjoyed the company of his peers: men who were lawyers, teachers, clerks and farmers like himself. In 1777, when he was 18, his father moved the family to a farm at Lochlea, near Tarbolton. Here Burns came into contact with enough like-minded young men to form a debating (and drinking) society, the Bachelor's Club. Burns also joined the Freemasons, which gave him access to another all-male society involving men of varying social class. His father's legal and financial troubles in disputes with his landlord and his increasing ill health, however, made this a difficult period, and it seems that Burns went through a period of intense depression and self-doubt, probably related to anxiety about his future career, in the early 1780s.

In 1785, after the death of their father, Robert and his brother Gilbert rented and worked on the farm of Mossgiel, near Mauchline, a lively small town. In the succeeding two years, Burns experienced the most turbulent period of his life. His first child was born to a farm servant at Lochlea, Elizabeth Paton, in May 1785. By this time he met his future wife Jean Armour in Mauchline, and by early 1786 she was pregnant with twins and Burns was being pursued by the church authorities for fornication and by her angry father, opposed to his daughter's possible marriage to a young man with a very doubtful reputation. Disillusioned with Jean, Burns also became involved with “Highland Mary” (Margaret Campbell) in the spring of 1786. Throughout spring, summer, and autumn of that year, he seriously considered emigration to Jamaica (possibly with Campbell, who died unexpectedly in October 1786) to take up a post on the sugar plantations, repeatedly stating that he had booked passage on a ship, and then failing to take it up. It is not surprising that he was interested in fleeing his tangled affairs. His life, however, was about to change dramatically. For during the same brief period, from summer 1785 to summer 1786, he had written an astonishing series of poems in the Scots language, including many of his most admired works, and on 31 July 1786, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect was published by a local printer at Kilmarnock.

The poems and songs included in Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect are self-conscious, playful, political and very aware of their relationships to literary tradition. Burns chose to open the collection with “The Twa Dogs”, a dialect poem in which two animals reflect upon the habits of their respective masters, a working man and a member of the upper classes. As the first poem in the collection, it immediately highlights Burns' politics in his satirical take on upper-class attitudes and his defence of working men and women. Caesar, the higher-class dog, marvels that: