Contents
Introduction
Editorial Policy and Practice
PART ONE
The Kilmarnock Edition, 1786
PART TWO
The Edinburgh Edition, 1787
PART THREE
The Edinburgh Edition, 1793
PART FOUR
The Songs of Burns Published During His Lifetime
PART FIVE
Anonymous and Pseudonymous Works
PART SIX
Posthumous Works collected 1796–2000
PART SEVEN
The Merry Muses of Caledonia
PART EIGHT
Undetermined and Rejected Works
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
Introduction
‘The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.’
Mark Twain, Pudd’ nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.
‘I think this enlightened age, as it is called, is as much given to persecution as the most barbarous. The transportation of the Deputies and Directors is not perhaps quite so bad as that of Muir, Palmer, etc., … Men persecute because they love persecution and so far as I am from believing fear to be the true cause of persecution that I begin to think that fear is the only motive that ever can persuade men to suffer those who differ in opinion from them to breathe the same atmosphere with them. This is not pleasant philosophy but I am afraid it is true.’
Charles James Fox to Charles Grey, 1801.
For the first time in over two centuries we have in this single volume all Burns’s surviving poems glossed and annotated. To do such editorial work has been for us a salutary and revealing task. What has fundamentally impressed us has been the tenacity of Burns’s creative drive which, despite all obstacles, sustained a flow of over six hundred poems and songs over a period of twenty-two years. Such productivity also entailed that he constantly metamorphosed his day to day experiences into poetry. Thus, as we annotated the poems, making as much use of that other source of parallel commentary, his quite extraordinary and, arguably, still under valued letters, not only his biographical shape but an encompassing picture of the peculiarly fraught late eighteenth century emerged. As admirable, and even more surprising, is the sustained quality of his poetic achievement. If we compare him to Wordsworth or, even more pertinently, Coleridge, briefly his creative contemporaries and consistent admirers of his genius, Burns achieves a higher ratio of poetry of the first order than either of them.
All this was achieved in opposition to a series of diverse and formidable obstacles. With some few significant exceptions, Burns’s biographers and editors have been, as we shall see, either anodyne or, worse, in some early instances, deliberately mendacious about the harsh physical, social and political environment in which he had to survive as a creative writer. Consequently this edition lays stress on his capacity not only to endure but poetically to overcome the multiple constraints he experienced. Textually and contextually, this edition, therefore, lays unique emphasis, partly by bringing some recently retrieved archival material to bear, on Burns’s necessarily ironic and often oblique political life and poems. Consequent on such a new explication of Burns’s political values and poetry, will be an exploration into the calculated and deeply successful manner in which, from the moment of his death, his achievement as a radically dissenting democratic poet was denied and suppressed. Indeed, what is revealed is the degree to which a whole segment of late-enlightenment liberal, Scottish culture of which Burns was an integral part was, as far as possible, obliterated from the national memory by reactionary forces which were quick to build on their total victory in the 1790s. Burns’s corpse, as we shall see, was not the only thing consigned to the grave in 1796. It is, indeed, a signal example of the fact that the victors do write history.
EARLY LIFE AND LABOUR
The primary and conditioning factor of Burns’s life was his experience of the often harshly brutal and almost always near impoverished nature of late-eighteenth century farm labour. We should first contemplate the physical conditions under which he had to write as a prelude to understanding the psychological and political consequences for his poetry. This has been obscured from us by the mass of sentimental, mainly nineteenth-century writing on Burns which sees him as the spokesman for a pietistic, hence politically quiescent, peasant culture.
In his quite wonderful opening stanzas to The Vision Burns describes himself ‘half-mad, half-fed, half-sarket’, portraying the fierce restrictions of work, domestic squalor and poverty in which he mainly lived. Or as he wrote from Mauchline in 1788 to Robert Cleghorn:
I am so harassed [sic] with Care and Anxiety about this farming project of mine, that my Muse has degenerated into the veriest prose-wrench that ever picked cinders or followed a Tinker. — When I am fairly got into the routine of business, I shall trouble you with a longer epistle; perhaps with some queries respecting farming: at present the world sits such a load on my mind that it has effaced almost every trace of the image of God in me.
Routine, initiated by the harsh demands of the marginal farm, so prematurely imposed on his childhood, Burns loathed.1 He described his early life as having ‘the cheerless gloom of a hermit with the unceasing moil of a galley slave’. Or, as in this letter to Mrs Dunlop of 1788 where, so characteristic of his letters, wit and despair blend:
… the heart of the man, and the fancy of the poet, are the two grand considerations for which I live: if miry ridges and dirty dunghills are to engross the best part of the functions of my soul immortal, I had better been a rook or a magpie all at once & then I would not have been plagued with any ideas superior to breaking of clods & picking up grubs: not to mention Barn-door Cocks or Mallards, creatures with which I could almost exchange lives at any time.
Some sort of acute nervous disorder was the result of his attempt to become disciplined to the mechanistic demands of becoming a flax worker in Irvine, 1784. After moving to Ellisland farm near Dumfries most of his new found wealth from the Edinburgh edition went to save the family farm at Mossgiel. The dwelling at Ellisland is described by the young lawyer, Robert Ainslie, as ‘ill contrived – and pretty Dirty’. Mrs Jean Burns is ‘Vulgar & Common-place in a high degree – and pretty round & fat … a kind Body in her own way, and the husband Tolerably Attentive to her.’ The poet’s local associates are ‘a Vulgar looking Tavern keeper from Dumfries; and his wife, more Vulgar — Mr Millar of Dalswinton’s Gardiner and his Wife — and said Wife’s sister — and a little fellow from Dumfries, [probably John
