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Burns, Wordsworth and the Politics of Vernacular Poetry Nigel Leask*

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Burns, Wordsworth and the Politics of Vernacular Poetry Nigel Leask* 10 Burns, Wordsworth and the Politics of Vernacular Poetry Nigel Leask* In his poem ‘At the Grave of Burns’, written during his Scottish tour of 1803, Wordsworth made no secret of his indebtedness to Robert Burns, ‘whose light I hailed when first it shone,/And showed my youth/How verse may build a princely throne/On humble truth’1. Paying homage by adopting Burns’ trademark ‘Standard Habbie’ stanza2, Wordsworth evoked the Lake- land peaks of Criffel and Skiddaw visible from both Grasmere and Burns’ Dumfriesshire farm at Ellisland, musing that; ‘Neighbours we were, and loving friends/We might have been’.3 Despite this homage to Burns, Wordsworth believed, on the basis of his reading of James Currie’s ‘Life’ prefixed to his 1800 edition of Burns’ poems, that the poet had died an indigent alcoholic at Dumfries seven years before in 1796.4 This explains Dorothy Words- worth’s comment, in her Recollections of the 1803 Tour, ‘there is no thought surviving in connexion with Burns’ daily life that is not heart-depressing’. Reports of the poverty of Burns’ widow Jean and his surviving sons ‘filled us with melancholy concern, which had a kind of connexion with ourselves’, she added.5 Dorothy registers familial anxiety concerning Burns’ role as poetic alter ego for her brother Wordsworth, despite the fact that of the two poets’ ‘neighbourliness’, and their possible friendship, thwarted by Burns’ untimely death. Since Russel Noyes’s 1944 article ‘Wordsworth and Burns’, there have been suprisingly few attempts to bring into focus a commonly-observed sense of Burns’ major influence on Wordsworth.6 Notwithstanding all Wordsworth’s talk of neighbourliness, a critical border-line has divided the two poets ever since the controversy following Burns’ early death in 1796, often issuing in partisan defence of one against the other. This may be in part because the partisan line usually maps onto the political border between Scotland and England, privileging Burns as Scotland’s ‘national bard’ against the English * My thanks to Hamish Mathison and David Simpson for their comments on this essay. 202 P. de Bolla et al. (eds.), Land, Nation and Culture, 1740-1840 © Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2005 Nigel Leask 203 or ‘British’ Wordsworth. But the line also follows the class and political divide, separating Burns the authentic ‘plebeian’ poet, whose politics became more rather than less radical in the years before his untimely death, and Wordsworth the middle-class radical, champion of the ‘real language of men’ during his revolutionary youth, before assuming the nefarious roles of ‘lost leader’ and Tory backwoodsman. Although Burns now scores massive points as the poetic spokesman for a small nation and a persecuted democratic movement, outside Scotland his poetry remains unjustifiably neglected in University literature departments, ostensibly because of the language difficult- ies facing non-Scots readers. Wordsworth, by contrast, is widely acknowledged as the major poet of British Romanticism; it’s ironic that one of the few underdeveloped areas of Wordsworth studies is Wordsworth’s Burns. In this essay I’ll sketch a different context for comparing the two poets by examining their respective ideas about vernacular poetry in relation to questions of social class, region and nation. In particular I’ll examine two important mediations of Burns’ poetry in the 1790s which, I argue, directly or indirectly influenced Wordsworth’s reading of Burns, the first that of the Catholic philologist Alexander Geddes, the second the poet’s posthumous editor James Currie. Both Burns and Wordsworth are renowned as poets of the vernacular in conscious rebellion against literary tradition – Burns’s ‘spark o’ Nature’s fire’,7 Wordsworth’s professed bid to imitate ‘the language of low and rustic life’. Olivia Smith has explored the political agenda behind Wordsworth’s Preface in relation to its privileging of a plebeian rustic language against the neo-classical diction of the polite canon.8 When set against Wordsworth’s generalized concept of the vernacular, however, Burns’s poetic language needs definition in regional, national and class terms. Carol MacGuirk describes it as a mixture of ‘Ayrshire dialect, archaic Middle Scots, words derived from other Scottish dialects, sentimental idioms, and “high” English rhetoric’.9 Burns drew extensively on the resources of both Scots and English literary tradition: but the diction of many of his best poems is also permeated with the vernacular speech of his own social class and region.10 In order to understand the politics of Burns’ language in the decades of the 1780s and 1790s, it is necessary to consider it in the context both of Enlight- enment debates about language, and the eighteenth-century Scottish revival of vernacular poetry. Burns and Scottish vernacular poetry The Scottish vernacular revival associated with the eighteenth-century poets Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson and Burns ran against the grain of the Scottish Enlightenment’s obsession with defining a non-regional standard English. John Barrell, in his essay ‘The Language Properly So Called’ (the title is a quotation from Aberdeen rhetorician George Campbell), discusses the appeal by conservative writers like (the Scottish) Campbell, (English) Dr Johnson, 204 Burns, Wordsworth and the Politics of Poetry and (Irish) Thomas Sheridan to the authority of common linguistic usage, where the word ‘common’ was understood to override local or occupational peculiarities, including what Sheridan termed ‘the invidious distinction’ of regional dialect.11 ‘Campbell estimated that only one in a hundred could speak the “reputable”, “national”, and “current” language’, but, comments Barrell, ‘his estimate is certainly a generous one.’12 Janet Sorenson develops Barrell’s point in The Grammar of Empire, arguing that the standard English ‘above grossness and below refinement’ promoted by the Scottish professors, and institutionalized in Dr Johnson’s Dictionary (1755), was in this sense ‘nobody’s language’.13 Not only did the philosophers of Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen achieve distinction as writers of English prose (just as Scots-born James Thomson has achieved fame as a writer of English poetry), but David Hume, James Beattie and Sir John Sinclair all compiled lists of ‘Scotticisms’, or undesirably provincial idioms, to assist their fellow-countrymen in their linguistic ‘improvement’. Scots ‘scientific whigs’ were proactively engaged as ‘North Britons’ in a modernizing Unionist project, instrumental in con- solidating the Georgian state in the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion. In this respect it is significant that when the Scottish Enlightenment did fly the flag of cultural nationalism, it was in the shape of James Macpherson’s Fingal and Temora: ‘ancient’ Celtic epics soaked in nostalgia for a lost culture of ‘sentimental savages’, but ‘translated’ from Gaelic into standard, albeit primitivized English prose poetry. All this raises the question as to exactly why Edinburgh literati like Professor Hugh Blair (former champion of Ossian) or Henry MacKenzie should in 1786 have welcomed Robert Burns with open arms as the author of a volume entitled Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect. That they did should surprise us, as well as the fact (Robert Crawford’s point) that when Professors of Belles Lettres like Hugh Blair or William Greenfield suggested improvements to Burns’ poetry, they left the Scots language of the poems intact, seeking rather the removal of ‘oaths, indecencies, or ‘quite inadmissible’ references to the Scriptures’.14 Evidently vernacular poetry was acceptable within polite Scottish culture, despite the strictures of the standardizers. Paradoxes abound in eighteenth-century Scottish attitudes to language, and we shouldn’t forget that the vernacular poets Ramsay, Fergusson and Burns all published a con- siderable corpus of English verse which was influenced by Augustan and neo-Augustan models, some of it of high quality. F.W. Freeman has pointed out that ‘anglicizers’ like Adam Smith also patronized William Hamilton of Bangour, author of the vernacular ballad ‘Braes of Yarrow’, notwithstanding Smith’s attack on Allan Ramsay and the ballad tradition on the grounds that ‘it is the duty of a poet to write like a gentleman’.15 James Beattie (‘a veritable Jekyl and Hyde on questions of Scots language’) composed a dedicatory epistle in Scots to Alexander Ross’s Helenore; Lord Hailes edited Ancient Scottish Poems (1770), and William and Alexander Tytler patronized Burns.16 All these men Nigel Leask 205 (with the exception of Oxford-educated Smith) still spoke broad Scots in private as well as ‘polished’ Anglo-Scots in public, at the same time as they sought to purge their written English prose of vulgar ‘Scotticisms’. Vernacular Scots poetry written in the ‘informal’ ‘Standard Habbie’ or ‘Christis Kirk’ stanza,17 in common with Scots folk song and ballads, was of course quite distinct from the ‘aureate’ tradition of Scottish late-medieval and renaissance court poetry terminated by the departure of James VI and the Scottish Court to London in 1603. Matthew McDiarmid claims that the Scots revival originated in the late seventeenth century as ‘a literary joke, an entertainment of the same order as macaronic or Hudibrastic verse’,18 privileging satire, informal Horatian epistle and, above all, pastoral. McDiarmid rightly emphasizes the links between Ramsay’s Scots pastoral The Gentle Shepherd (1725) and the early eighteenth-century
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