Beside the Bard

Scottish Lowland Poetry in the Age of Burns

George S. Christian

• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781684481811, 9781684481828
• eBook ISBN: 9781684481835
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Beside the Bard argues that Scottish poetry in the age of Burns reclaims not a single past, dominated and overwritten by the unitary national language of an elite ruling class, but a past that conceptualizes the Scottish nation in terms of local self-identification, linguistic multiplicity, cultural and religious difference, and transnational political and cultural affiliations. This fluid conception of the nation may accommodate a post-Union British self-identification, but it also recognizes the instrumental and historically contingent nature of "Britishness." Whether male or female, loyalist or radical, literati or autodidacts, poets such as Alexander Wilson, Carolina Olyphant, Robert Tannahill, and John Lapraik, among others, adamantly refuse to imagine a single nation, British or otherwise, instead preferring an open, polyvocal field, on which they can stage new national and personal formations and fight new revolutions. In this sense, "Scotland" is a revolutionary category, always subject to creative destruction and reformation.Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

1

BURNS’S AYRSHIRE “BARDIES”

John Lapraik and David Sillar

BURNS SCHOLARSHIP HAS LONG NOTED the existence of a community of Ayrshire poets with links to the bard, chief among them John Lapraik and David Sillar. This chapter examines the work of these two poets, with regard to both their direct relationship with Burns through exchanges of epistolary verse and the specific ways their poetry compares to Burns’s linguistically and thematically. As two of the three poets most frequently identified as having unsuccessfully attempted to follow Burns through the narrow aperture between literary obscurity and fame (the other, Janet Little, will be considered in chapter 2), Lapraik and Sillar emulated the Burns model in some ways but not others, indicating that the Ayrshire soil bred distinct kinds of poets with their own approaches to the socioeconomic challenges of their environment and the potential for poetry to mediate social change and “improvement.”¹ A closer study of their poetry may also contribute to answering Corey Andrews question, why Burns and not his “others”? In this sense, considering Lapraik and Sillar as literary “failures” may tell us much about the criteria for “success,” both in Burns’s historical moment and in literary criticism since then, but perhaps more importantly about the local conditions that produced the Burns phenomenon in the first place.

Recent work on Burns has begun to pay close attention to the extensive connections between Ayrshire, Enlightenment, and modernization. In a magisterial study of Burns and pastoral, Nigel Leask reminds us that later eighteenth-century Ayrshire was not “an obscure provincial backwater” but rather was “linked by the discourse and practice of improvement to the birth of the modern capitalist age.”² During the lifetimes of Burns, Lapraik, and Sillar, “improvement” announced itself to Ayrshire not only in the rationalization and commercialization of agriculture but in

the rise of manufactures, country banking, and the booms and busts of the new credit economy, war, and empire, accompanied by religious and cultural enlightenment. Ayrshire was also highly “globalized,” to the extent that its landed elite benefited disproportionately from colonial expansion in the Caribbean and India, while rich and poor alike suffered palpably from the loss of the American colonies.… If at times Burns’s poetry mounted a “zigzag” criticism of improvement, elsewhere (especially in the Kirk poems, with their bitter satires on religious prejudice) it fully endorsed the rational spirit of enlightenment. After all, his formidable literacy was itself a product of Ayrshire’s provincial enlightenment, distinguished by new civic institutions, turnpike roads, and postal service, facilitating the circulation of newspapers and letters. The fact that Burns never attended college doesn’t mean that he was “Heaven-taught.”³

This view of Ayrshire sits side by side with the image of tenant farmers and their laborers toiling to wrest a bare subsistence from the soil or, to quote Andrew Noble, of “the domestic squalor and poverty in which [Burns] mainly lived.”⁴ Rather, the hard times that beset farmers like Burns and his brother, Lapraik, and Sillar’s father (the young Sillar left the farm to open a grocery business) could be felt at all levels of society, if not in equal proportion.⁵ Viewing Ayrshire as part of a “globalized” community of interest, tied together by thickening networks of exchange, technology, and communications, situates Burns and his contemporaries as literal producers, not only in the new economy but in the emerging literary discourse of an enlightened, “rational” society.⁶ As we will see, Lapraik and Sillar conduct a similar “zigzag” critique of improvement, showing ambivalence about its moral and economic effects (though in Lapraik less “satirical” in its treatment of religious orthodoxy), while generally endorsing the “formidable literacy” that the institutions and innovations of the new economy afforded.

Moreover, the rational, literate, and globalizing Ayrshire pictured by Leask and the literature of “improvement” illustrates the extent to which traditional landed society of lairds, tenants, crofters, and laborers had already given way to a more urbanized provincial society consisting of lawyers, teachers, bankers, clerks, tradespeople, shopkeepers, artisans, and workers of all sorts, or as John Barrell has put it, “the rural professional class” that created “the landscape of parliamentary enclosure.”⁷ As Leask points out, the tenant farmer Burns “occupied the middle rung on the social hierarchy of the rural Lowlands, the most precarious lower edge of that rung, it is true, but still not too far below” Barrell’s rural professionals.⁸ While Leask notes that Burns worked in the fields alongside his hired hands, he nevertheless employed them for wages.⁹ According to Leask, this made Burns a “labouring” but not a “labouring class poet.”¹⁰ Indeed, the same goes for Lapraik, who inherited land and leased it for farming, and Sillar, who left the farm for town life as a grocer and then a teacher. This distinction associates the poetry of “improvement” composed by Burns and his contemporaries with the middle ranks (albeit lower middle ranks) of Scottish society, producing forms of social, political, and economic identity that differ in significant respects from those produced by laboring- or servant-class poets, such as, for example, Janet Little and Isobel Pagan. Read together, Burns, Lapraik, Sillar, and other similarly situated provincial poets thus form a kind of choric voice that articulates both the aspirations and anxieties of an emergent “middle” position between traditional and “modern” forms of wealth and the division of labor, aristocratic patronage and the mass literary market, local identity and “Scottishness” or “Britishness.”

At the same time, however, the fine distinction between a “laboring” or “laboring class” poet becomes complicated by Burn’s self-identification (and extended experience) with manual labor and the chronic financial difficulties that he and his family could never seem to escape. As noted in the introduction, his transformation from the struggling tenant farmer Robert Burnes and aspiring poet Rob Burness to Robert Burns, author of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect signifies Burns’s acute awareness of the ambiguous relationship between “objective” categories of socioeconomic status (which class?) and self-representation (laborer/enlightened farmer/poet/Scotch bard). Burns’s case is complicated also by the critical reception of his poetry, which to some degree objectified (and commoditized) Burns as a laboring-class poet but also empowered Burns to fashion a public persona as a national bardic figure. To confuse matters further, the Edinburgh critics who cast Burns as a native plebeian genius urged him to grind the rougher edges off some of the vernacular poems that made his reputation to begin with. As Carol McGuirk points out, the “capital’s literati (many of them clergymen who may have disliked the flippant tone of the religious satires), recognized Burns’s extraordinary gifts but rejected his evident resolve to infiltrate the poetic canon, abolishing the standard-English monopoly of literary diction.… The resistance to Burns broke out most strongly following his premature death in 1796, but even in 1787 Hugh Blair, who advised Burns on the second edition of Poems, evidently insisted on genteel counterbalance: all those asterisked disclaimers at the head and foot of Burns’s pages.”¹¹ Burns’s class position thus remains difficult to pinpoint, perhaps illustrating the interaction between an increasing fluidity of social categories and the enhanced possibilities for self-fashioning in a late eighteenth-century world of loosening class boundaries.

The question of whether and how Burns’s Ayrshire contemporaries may have influenced him remains an open one. Gerard Carruthers wonders whether there was “a ready-made poetic community in the geographical area around him within which Burns is locating himself” or whether “it is his fictional projection, to some extent, that creates a later reality.” In any event, Carruthers doubts that “Burns was readily slotting himself into a vibrant Ayrshire Scots poetry writing community” but rather believes that “the idea of the ‘Bards on the Bonie Doon’ was largely a creative fantasy (not unhelpful, however, even in its one-sidedness) when Burns conceived it in 1784, and remained so until his own published success largely spawned a shoal of imitators who did not do much for the reputation of poetry in Scots.”¹² Still, Carruthers acknowledges that Lapraik and Sillar composed poetry contemporaneously with Burns, even if they later “tidied” their previous output or produced new material for publication once they realized the extent of Burns’s success.¹³

Leask takes a somewhat more positive view of the “vibrancy” of the Ayrshire circle of poets. Noting the dual meaning of “bardie” as a diminutive of “ ‘bard’—in the grandiose Ossianic sense”—but also as “bold, impudent of speech,” Leask imagines the “Ayrshire bardies” as seeking “a vent for their frustrated aspirations in a swaggering poetical rejection of social emulation in a class-bound society, and (in quieter moments) a more introspective desire for sentimental ‘self-improvement.’ Inspired by Ramsay and Fergusson, as well by English poets such as Shenstone, Goldsmith, and Gray, they circulated their verse epistles in manuscript, taking advantage of Ayrshire’s new roads and postal service (Lapraik was himself postmaster in Muirkirk).”¹⁴ From this perspective, Burns appears rooted in a poetry-writing community that shared common occupations, values, and, at least for a time, companionship. Moreover, the fact that neither Lapraik nor Sillar followed Burns very far down the vernacular path seems curious if we hold them to have significantly modified their respective oeuvres in the tail of Burns’s comet. The titles of their volumes do not particularly parrot Burns’s, make no claim to the “Scottish dialect,” and utilize the traditional forms of Scots poetry, such as Standard Habbie or “Cherry and Slae” stanzas, but without the Scots language. Perhaps they believed that they could not match Burns’s talent in vernacular poetry and could not “tidy” their poetry nearly enough to pass muster under the literary standard established by Burns. But perhaps what they had to say about their world demanded different linguistic choices than Burns made. I will investigate the latter possibility.

Despite the high hopes of Lapraik and Sillar, they did not reach a readership that extended very far beyond the local or regional. Still, as Leask, Bob Harris, and others have pointed out, the rapid pace of provincial urbanization that changed the physical landscape of the Scottish Lowlands altered the literary landscape...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Burns’s Ayrshire “Bardies”: John Lapraik and David Sillar
• 2. Burns and the Women “Peasant” Poets: Janet Little and Isobel Pagan
• 3. Alexander Wilson and the Price of Radicalism
• 4. Lady Nairne: Burns’s Jacobite Other
• 5. “In the Shadow of Burns”: Robert Tannahill
• 6. Burns and the Jacobins: James Kennedy and Alexander Geddes
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author