After reading Robert Burn’s poetry and realizing that he’s the reason why we wing that one song at the start of each new year, I am thoroughly intrigued. For such a seemingly harmless song, he represents a less than benign person. He was sexually active outside of marriage, he wrote using his home dialect, he was present in the history and politics of his time, etc. He was involved. He had opinions and used the language closest to him to voice them, he seems unafraid.
The thing I am most interested about Burns is the actual publication, distribution, and reception of his poetry. I could not imagine that all his personal protests against the strictures of marriage and the church went over well with everyone in his community. He seems to use his poetry to make a stand against these large entities and does it very intentionally. Burns uses a rhyme scheme and can easily code-switch between the Scottish dialect and the English. He shows his intelligence through his allusions to history and Greek mythology.
Burns’s verses can be funny and poignant at the same time as they can be awful for women. While he was clearly the ladies’s man, he did not view them as much more than a body waiting for his calls. This problematizes his poetry and his persona as both a citizen in that era (when talking of a woman’s body was taboo) and in this one.
Romanticism Blog 