out Fergusson, "by far my elder brother in the Muse," as Burns called him, there would have been no Burns.
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Robert Burns (1759-1796) has become so much of a Scottish national myth that the reality of his achievement is often obscured in the mists of sentimental rhetoric. Son of a tenant farmer in southwest Scotland, Burns shared during his early years the hard-working and materially ill-rewarded life of his class. Yet, with that zeal for education which distinguished the Scottish peasantry at that time, his father arranged with other farmers of the region to have his children taught from their early years by a well-educated young man, who drilled his pupils thoroughly in reading, writing, and English composition, and who introduced them to a wide selection of English literature from Shakespeare to contemporary English poets. It is a measure of the confused situation of Scottish culture that Burns, son of a Scottish peasant, received a formal education in English, learning by heart English poetry and learning to write an elegant Addisonian English prose. His letters, of which some seven hundred survive, are, except for a single one written to a close friend in racy Scots, composed in Augustan English of considerable formality. All around him Burns encountered Scots folk traditions in song and story, and he acquired some knowledge of older Scottish poetry from versions circulated in chapbooks and in collections such as Ramsay's
Ever Green
, but his formal education was an English education. The poet he quotes most in his letters and even sometimes paraphrases in his poetry is Pope.
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Burns's earliest efforts had been influenced partly by the Scottish folk tradition and partly by his reading of English poetry. After his discovery of Fergusson's Scots poems he developed a poetic language of great variety, combining Scots and English in different ways. He showed remarkable skill in the verse letter, a form used earlier in the century by minor Scots versifiers, combining, as none of his predecessors had done, the formality of rhyme and meter, and of stanza forms derived from older Scots poetry, with the informality of tone suitable to letters to friends. These lettersthe "Epistle to Davie," the "Epistle to J. Lapraik," ''To James Smith," among many othersare written either in the "Standart Habby" stanza or in a modified form of the complex stanza of
The Cherrie and the Slae
, by Montgomerie. They generally begin by setting the scene, giving the season of the year in terms of the farmer's activities, then moving from the farmhouse, where he is writing, outward to Scotland and the world in general, to place at the cen-
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